The American Prospect # 327

PROSPECTS 2032

AN AGENDA FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS

AUGUST 2022 PROSPECT.ORG

The Future of Manufacturing Must Be Made in America If the past two years have shown us anything, it’s that the United States can no longer depend on imports for the critical goods it needs.

We must strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

Let’s re-establish domestic supply chains, create millions of new well-paid jobs, and build a stronger, more secure America.

americanmanufacturing.org

August 2022 VOL 33 #4

S T C E P S PRO 04 Looking Over the Horizon By David Dayen 06 The Case Against Judicial Review By Ryan Cooper 10 Why We Need Social Housing By Ramenda Cyrus 13 Abolish State Senates By Harold Meyerson 16 A Four-Day Week at Five Days’ Pay By Sarah Jaffe 19 Cut Off Private Equity’s Money Spigot By David Dayen 22 Thinking Sectorally By Isabelle Gius

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57

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25 It’s Time for Universal Voting By E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport 28 How to De-Develop in an Age of Fire and Flood By Gabrielle Gurley 30 It’s Time for Public Pharma By Alexander Sammon

Features 34 “Welcome to Hell”

Mars, Inc., is best known for making chocolate bars.

But it also owns the most pet hospitals in the U.S., and workers say the conditions are toxic.

By Jarod Facundo and Brian Osgood

42 The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas Fortune 100 giants Tyson Foods and Walmart have heavy influence over two cities within 20 miles of one another, tucked into the northwest corner of the state.

By Olivia Paschal

Culture

53 Robert Kuttner on four books about the economy 57 Paul Starr on What It Took to Win and The Destructionists 61 Steph Herold on Hollywood’s Role in Stigmatizing Abortion 64 Parting Shot: Interview With a Straw Woman

By Francesca Fiorentini Cover art by Sarah Angèle Wilson

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 1

On the Web Visit prospect.org/ontheweb to read the following stories:

The Dobbs Ruling

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. The Prospect has covered every aspect of how abortion seekers will be able to get medical care and what the White House can do to help ensure that.

Left Anchor

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The Prospect’s new podcast with managing editor Ryan Cooper and Alexi the Greek covers the January 6th hearings, school financing, and the state of American socialism.

INFLATION AND THE

FED

Prospect executive editor David Dayen looks at the hidden driver of high gas prices, the changing dynamics on inflation, and whether the Federal Reserve is going too far to slow down the economy.

2 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Executive Action Tracker

Follow our tracker to see how many of the 110 executive actions we’re monitoring have been implemented by the Biden White House.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR David Dayen FOUNDING CO-EDITORS Robert Kuttner,

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CO-FOUNDER Robert B. Reich EDITOR AT LARGE Harold Meyerson SENIOR EDITOR Gabrielle Gurley MANAGING EDITOR Ryan Cooper ART DIRECTOR Jandos Rothstein ASSOCIATE EDITOR Susanna Beiser STAFF WRITER Alexander Sammon JOHN LEWIS WRITING FELLOW Ramenda Cyrus WRITING FELLOWS Jarod Facundo, Lee Harris INTERNS Robert Hitt, Daniel Netter, Madeline

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S T C E P S O PR 2032 Looking Over the Horizon A series about ideas that can sprout into progress in the coming decades

By David Dayen It’s fair to say that those who lean left politically in America are experiencing a summer of despair. A hopeful legislative path at the start of Joe Biden’s term has narrowed down to a slightly larger infrastructure bill, a micro-sized gun safety measure, and other bits and pieces that fall well short of the early ambitions. High inflation in food and fuel has spawned an angry populace at home, when it’s not triggering mass starvation and social unrest abroad. Contractionary fiscal and monetary policy are combining to make a recession nearly unavoidable. The hot war still raging in Europe threatens democracy worldwide. The Supreme Court has abrogated the constitutional right for women to dictate their own medical care, the most consequential in a flood of rightwing Court rulings that don’t have a foreseeable end. The president is deeply unpopular and Democrats are about to lose at least one chamber of Congress. Looming is a 2024 election that could easily trigger a constitutional crisis, if it doesn’t just hand over power to a Republican Party that would be far more unrestrained and Trumpified than it was after 2016. Practically everyone in

America who isn’t rich or white, preferably both, would be at risk.

Oh, and there’s still a pandemic, lingering and mutating.

And the world is burning up.

Historian Adam Tooze has called all this the “polycrisis,” with the calamities mutually reinforcing one another and pulling the world into disorder and risk. The despondency is self-generating, a by-product of the mountains that have sprung up in the way of progress.

That makes it a perfect time to think forward, to stretch beyond the current moment and imagine the society we want a decade, two decades, five decades from now. Not just because it’s comforting to escape the dread of the moment, but because it’s the only way to, eventually, defeat it.

Back in April 2018, I wrote a piece for The New Republic titled “Ban Targeted Advertising.” I had a problem with monopolized digital platforms making a fortune off tracking people across the internet and bombarding them with messages. It violated user privacy, and furthered financial scams, discrimination, and the disinformation and hate speech that have polarized our politics. It also made it nearly impossi-

ble for most news organizations to survive, damaging our democracy in yet another way. Just as we regulate cigarette ads and marketing to children, we can prevent personalized data from dictating what messages confront you online.

At the time, I was a coalition of one. There was no movement to ban targeted ads, no buy-in from progressive organizations or political leaders. The ad tech industry was formidable and ready to squash any attempt at weakening their power. But I thought it was a good idea that could be built upon, as a way to think about transforming our economy by altering the business model of the most harm-inducing sectors. It was a vision of what one small aspect of society could look like in the future.

Fast-forward to today. The growing movement to rein in the power of Big Tech has increasingly identified business-model solutions to solve the problem. There’s a Ban Surveillance Advertising coalition of over 50 organizations. A poll from last year found that 81 percent of the public supported keeping their personal data out of the hands of advertisers. And House and Senate Democrats have introduced the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act.

I L LU S T R AT ION S B Y S A R A H A NG È L E W I L S ON 4 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

This movement is poised to grow. One of the first fears articulated in the postRoe era is the role of surveillance, through period apps or tracking search data, as a means to criminalize pregnancy loss. That terrifying prospect reified the importance of this reform: It wasn’t just about getting rid of annoying sneaker ads on my feeds, it was about bodily autonomy and personal freedom and a hundred other things.

The road to change starts out with a plan, maybe even just an idea. The idea may take years to gestate, to find support, to move the landscape from the point where it’s impossible to the point where it’s urgent. A left politics needs ideas, a signal on the horizon, a goal to work toward. It needs to be able to fight the immediate spasms of crisis and attack while keeping an eye toward concrete accomplishments. And it needs to climb the obstacles in the path of that accomplishment deliberately, finding each toehold until it settles at the top.

We have a signature example of this on the political right, distasteful but useful all the same. The modern movement to end abortions in America began before Roe v. Wade was even decided in 1973. Its adherents went forward with their idea to engage new audiences in politics, particularly evangelicals. They built numerous groups with varying levels of radicalism to write policy, persuade legislators, and intimidate patients. They took aim at federal funding of abortions and state access regulations, while agitating for legal victories.

The imbalance of our political system allowed the anti-abortion movement to win its big triumph without ever forging a popular majority. But it suffered decades of losses before reaching that stage, and kept right on organizing, with increasing incremental

success: The right to choose was already functionally eliminated in most of the states where it will now be literally so.

Conservatives do not have a monopoly on playing the long game. From the gay rights to the civil rights movements, progressives have labored long to make ideas

reality. Even today we see those gears turn: After decades of frustration, anti-monopolists went from the fringes of academia to the heart of the key federal agencies policing mergers.

For progressives, the hurdles are often higher, including from a Democratic Party that, once the ’60s were over, has shown discomfort with transformational change.

But we have no alternative to keep pressing for a more equal, more just, more prosperous nation. And before reaching a goal, we have to set a course to it.

In this special series, the Prospect has identified nine big ideas, markers to lay down about our economy, our working life, our political processes, our environment, our health, and our future. None of them will happen this year, and probably not next year.

They are ideas that are emerging, rounding into shape, with coalitions being born and organizing being initiated. They are the ideas we think everyone will be talking about in 2032 rather than 2022.

There are already robust movements for Black Lives, for Medicare for All, and for a Green New Deal. We wanted to go out a little further on the ledge, finding new concepts to rally around. These ideas aren’t a part of any candidate litmus test, at least not yet.

Some of them have already sprouted in other countries; some even have gained some purchase here. We can say one thing about all of them: Mass adoption will be incredibly difficult. But that’s no reason not to try.

In fact, it’s the main reason to start now.

The last thing many of us might want to do in this dark moment is to think about how the country can be better many years from now, through tireless effort.

But that’s the kind of commitment it actually takes to move our stubborn ship of state. And sometimes it just takes a voice to give expression to an idea to start the perilous journey to bring it to life.

A political movement needs big ideas, needs North Stars, needs a sense of what it is actually working to achieve. We don’t know whether this series will spur that necessary work to its beginning. Come back in ten years and find out. n AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

S T C E P S PRO

The Case Against Judicial Review

If Democrats don’t bring the Supreme Court to heel, Americans will live under judicial despotism for the foreseeable future.

By Ryan Cooper In just a one-week span in June, the Supreme Court dealt several terrific blows to American freedom and self-government. It overturned a century-old New York law restricting the concealed carry of firearms; it overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing about 26 states to ban abortion, with more to come if Republicans win the congressional midterms; and it sharply limited the ability for the executive branch to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which could eventually hamstring the administrative apparatus that has governed the United States for well over a century.

The Court also recently agreed to hear a case on the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which holds that state legislatures have total power over their electoral systems. If the ruling goes conservatives’ way again, it would allow gerrymandered Republican legislatures to hand the presidency to their own party in 2024, striking another blow against democracy itself.

This disaster is being perpetrated by perhaps the least democratically legitimate Supreme Court in history. Five of the six right-wing justices were appointed by presidents who took office after losing the popular vote. The other, Clarence Thomas, is married to an avowed conservative activist who actively agitated to overturn the 2020 election. In 2016, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell held one seat open for a year, in violation of all precedent and the text of the Constitution, to ensure his preferred replacement. Republicans have had a Court majority since the Nixon administration, even though they have won the presidential popular vote just once since 1989.

6 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

The inexorable march of tradition and timidity on the part of the government’s other branches has given this pack of conservative apparatchiks what amounts to monarchical powers over the American people. It’s no wonder that their decisions are so

terrible—and so ominous for the country’s future.

What is to be done? I propose to attack the problem at the root and abolish judicial review. The Court does not have the sole power to interpret the Constitution, nor the power to strike down any law it choses, and it’s time to say so.

Even fairly hard-bitten progressives are often unsettled by this idea. Most Americans learn in high school civics that the Supreme Court gets final say on whether laws are constitutional, and that this is core to the functioning of the constitutional system.

Yet this view is incomplete. Judicial review does not appear in the Constitution and is not firmly rooted in American tradition. For roughly the first three-quarters of the 19th century and the middle third of the 20th, those powers were heavily circumscribed by tradition and competition

from the other branches of government.

And for good reason: When the Court has exercised sole power to interpret the Constitution, with rare exceptions it has used that power to obliterate Americans’ constitutional rights, uphold white supremacy, and protect abusive corporations from unions and the regulatory state.

While challenging the judiciary is commonly associated with Andrew Jackson, the two best presidents in history, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had no choice but to directly confront the Court in order to advance justice. If America does not follow their lead, presidential powers will evaporate along with those of Congress and the freedom of the American people.

Let me begin with the text of the Constitution. It grants by far the most formal authority to Congress—the power to tax, regulate foreign trade and interstate commerce, coin money, declare war, create patents and a post office, and much else. The president executes the laws as written by Congress, serves as commander in chief of the military, and conducts foreign policy.

The Supreme Court, by contrast, only has “judicial Power” that “shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority.”

As often in the Constitution, this is exceptionally vague, but as far as the Court being able to overturn acts of Congress, the justices arrogated that privilege to themselves in Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

Though some founders, like Alexander Hamilton, did argue in favor of judicial review, support was by no means unanimous. As historian Michael Kammen explains in A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture, Marbury was highly controversial at the time and remained so for decades, which restricted judicial review in practice. “[It] is not widely appreciated,” Kammen writes, “that the procedure and its supporting doctrine developed gradually, was used sparingly for almost a century, and has never lacked critics who were both harsh and astute: Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren, for example.”

One of the few times during the antebellum period the Court did exercise judicial review in a high-profile case, the resulting controversy was so explosive it helped touch

Judicial review does not appear in the Constitution and is not firmly rooted in American tradition. off the Civil War. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously ruled that African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and added for good measure that the carefully constructed Missouri Compromise—which had kept a rough balance of power between slave and free states, and banned slavery from the territories— was unconstitutional, even though it had nothing to do with the specifics of the case.

This was a raw exercise of political power. Taney was a partisan Democrat, defender of slavery, and die-hard racist, and was using rule-by-decree in an attempt to settle the slavery question in favor of the planter class. The Constitution didn’t enter into the equation.

But the rest of the country did not submit to Taney’s despotism. Northern voters and leaders reacted with furious outrage, and multiple state legislatures passed measures defying the Court. Arguments against Dred Scott and the lawless Court were a central part of the new Republican Party’s messaging, and in Lincoln’s 1860 campaign for president.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln directly attacked judicial review: “[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” In this, Lincoln followed the thinking of Jefferson, who argued that judicial review makes the Constitution “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Lincoln got to the core of the problem.

Under a strong form of judicial review, the

Court has despotic powers by definition.

Congress and the president theoretically check one another, and more importantly have to face voters at regular intervals.

But justices are appointed, serve for life, can overrule both the legislature and the president, and can’t be removed from office aside from impeachment (which, as Donald Trump proved beyond any question, is virtually a dead letter in our hyper-partisan times). Indeed, the Court doesn’t even have an ethics code of any kind. It would be completely legal for a justice to hold an auction for his or her vote outside the Court building.

During the war, Taney attempted to reverse President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly authorizes doing so “in Cases of Rebellion.” Taney then tried to hold Gen. George Cadwalader in contempt for refusing to obey his ruling. Both times, the Lincoln administration ignored him. As the president pointed out in a later message to Congress, Taney’s tendentious nitpicking would destroy the foundations of the Constitution itself: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” (That said, Lincoln still got Congress to pass a law supporting his action once it came back into session, just for good measure.)

Unfortunately, this spirit did not last.

Supreme Court highlights of the Gilded Age included tossing the convictions of white supremacist mass murderers for violating their victims’ civil rights (United States v. Cruikshank), giving legal sanction to Jim Crow apartheid (Plessy v. Ferguson), inventing the idea of corporate personhood without even providing an argument for it (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad), and spending 40 years striking down any economic regulation that interfered with the free market (most notably in Lochner v. New York).

The Lochner era extended through the early New Deal period, when the Court struck down several of President Roosevelt’s attempts to fight the Depression, leading him to propose a measure to add additional justices to the Court in 1937. The plan did not pass, but shortly after FDR proposed it, conservative Justice Owen Roberts switched his position to upholding New Deal laws. Though historians debate how much Roberts was motivated by FDR’s plan, the president’s goal was accomplished, and for the next couple of decades the Court AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

S T C E P S PRO was relatively sparing with its review powers. Once again, fighting American history’s greatest calamities required bringing the Court to heel.

One of the worst aspects of judicial review is that it ultimately corrupts law itself.

By placing constitutional interpretation in the hands of a council of unaccountable ideologues, the temptation to use that power for political purposes is overwhelming. The very idea that it is possible to interpret language or assemble facts in a neutral fashion gives way to fabricated reasons why the Constitution mandates whatever specific political goal the justices happen to have.

To be sure, there has been one period of a couple decades when the Court was a force for good, from striking down segregation in Brown v. Board of Education to establishing the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. However, these actions were not nearly as effective as legislation—the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act actually ended Jim Crow, not Brown, and in any case half the reason Jim Crow got going can be attributed to the Court itself, through Plessy. Furthermore, deciding questions of medical policy should be a matter for Congress; we’re seeing today the fragility of judicially established protections that can be torn up one by one.

Today, an entrenched conservative majority, lifetime appointments, the de rigueur trend of strategic retirement, and the distortions of the Electoral College mean that the Court is all but immune from democratic accountability. It has not sunk in yet among many liberals, especially the Democratic Party leadership, how doomed they are under the status quo. Absent aggressive reform, it is vanishingly unlikely that Democrats will get a majority on the Court for the foreseeable future.

The majority simply has to hold on long enough for Republicans to win the Senate and the presidency, in which case the oldest members can retire. To break this majority, Democrats would have to hold the presidency continuously for something like 20 years, which hasn’t happened since the New Deal. In the meantime, the Court has been hacking away at the voting rights of liberal demographics, making it hard for Democrats to maintain state legislative or House majorities. If they aren’t stopped, another 8 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Plessy-style decision blessing an updated version of Jim Crow is coming soon.

Groups like Demand Justice have opted to advocate for adding justices as a reform solution. Packing the Court is completely in keeping with previous law and tradition; indeed, it was FDR’s preferred option.

But at bottom, it would preserve the principle of judicial review, while mostly abolishing it in a cumbersome manner with an unclear resolution.

Changing the makeup of the Court by stacking it with partisans would still leave the judicial branch free to overturn laws, but only with the approval of whichever party held Congress and the White House last. If Democrats pack the Court, Republicans will of course return the favor at the earliest possible moment. Under such a system, ultimately it will be elections that settle questions of constitutional law. If that is the objective, it is both more honest and dramatically easier to simply attack judicial review head-on.

So what would this mean in practice? A current or future president, in response to some particularly egregious Supreme Court diktat, would explain their problems with the ruling, and insist that they will not obey the decision. They would say that in their opinion, Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, that the Court does not get to claim sole power to interpret the Constitution, and that the Constitution has no stipulation about the U.S. being a judicial dictatorship. From now on, if Congress, for example, directs the president to regulate air pollution, then they will do as instructed, rather than obeying the Court’s wishes.

Now, this would likely end in a direct confrontation between the president and the

Other rich democracies do not have anything close to America’s brand of hyper-powerful Supreme Court.

Court, with one commanding the power of the judiciary and the other the federal bureaucracy and the military. But while the possibility of such a conflict is alarming, it would only bring into the open what is already happening—a straight-up contest for political power that has nothing to do with the law.

What might the endgame look like? It would probably resolve into something similar to what we see in other rich democracies that have not allowed their governments to become dangerously imbalanced in favor of the judiciary. While constitutional courts or other systems of theoretical judicial review do exist in many peer countries (and they have gotten somewhat stronger over the years, particularly in the European Union), none of them have anything close to America’s brand of hyperpowerful Supreme Court.

The Nordic countries, for instance, have some formal processes of judicial review, but outside of Norway the tradition of parliamentary supremacy is so strong that they are virtually never used, and even the Supreme Court of Norway is far less powerful than the country’s parliament. The U.K. and New Zealand do have a formal review process for the courts, but only for acts of public bodies—they cannot strike down legislation.

Australia’s High Court has nominal powers similar to its American counterpart, but in practice has hesitated to exercise them to nearly the same degree. Germany does have a fairly powerful Federal Constitutional Court—but wouldn’t you know it, that means it struggles with some of the same problems as the U.S., like when that court struck down a law legalizing abortion in 1993. (Still, even this court is not nearly as aggressive or powerful as its American counterpart.)

No other functioning democracy has anything like the wretched American spectacle of the last decade, where minority interest groups spend millions trying to get through the courts what they could not get through the legislature, and the people wait on tenterhooks during each session of the top court to see which of their freedoms might vanish next. And we don’t have to live with that.

Reversing what can seem like an iron law of judicial supremacy in the U.S. is admittedly hard to imagine happening. But there are also options that stop short of this. As

J. SCOT T APPLEWHITE , ERIN SCHAFF /AP PHOTO

Left: Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott ruling.

Right: Clarence Thomas.

Joshua Zeitz recently suggested at Politico, Congress could limit judicial review over certain issues. Or it could add a supermajority requirement for the Court to overturn laws or take away previously granted constitutional rights. Indeed, Article III states that the Supreme Court holds appellate jurisdiction in all cases, but “with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Again, this is practically equivalent to my suggestion—if Congress were to just append jurisdiction-stripping language to every law, as it has done in a handful of cases in the past, judicial review would be ended. But if preserving a scrap of tradition is necessary to get people behind the basic idea, so be it.

Finally, as the Prospect has written previously, on issues of statutory interpretation Congress can counteract the Court, if they disagree with its findings, simply by clarifying statutory language to reassert their prerogatives. (Indeed, one factor enabling the current power of the Court is paralysis

in Congress, which makes such simple language fixes extremely difficult.)

The key thing is to attack the Court headon. The other branches cannot just sit there and take the arrant fake-legal decrees, because that will only embolden the justices. The plain and undeniable fact is that unfettered judicial review is a violation of basic principles of American democracy, and no court can be trusted with it.

Under any government, there is always a danger of its power being abused. Democratically elected legislatures are not immune from this problem. It must be admitted that, should Republicans take control of Congress and the White House without any constraint from the Court, there’s a strong chance they’d pass all manner of abusive stuff. The Florida legislature, for example, recently passed a bigoted “don’t say gay” bill that blatantly violates the civil rights of LGBT teachers.

But the risk of theoretically unconstrained congressional majorities must be set against

the current fact of the Court steadily stealing the powers of Congress, eroding the freedom of the people—and, of course, doing nothing to protect gay Florida teachers from a feral state legislature. It’s far from the first time American courts have ignored the Bill of Rights, and it won’t be the last.

The relevant question when it comes to constitutional design is what kinds of government institutions are most likely to abuse their power. Common sense and history teach us that elected representatives who must seek re-election at regular intervals are the least likely to abuse their power. Totally unaccountable courts where the judges can essentially pick their successors have much greater opportunity.

A judicial system that limits itself to adjudicating criminal and civil cases, and making sure that legislation is interpreted consistently, can fill a necessary and proper role. The Supreme Court, drunk on unchecked power for too long, must be brought to heel. n AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

S T C E P S PRO

Why We Need Social Housing What Medicare for All is for health care, social housing is for shelter.

By Ramenda Cyrus America sits on the cusp of a severe housing shortage. The systems that have propped up the American housing economy are failing, as they have been for a while. The 2008 financial crisis led to a depletion of residential investment, and a decade later—before the country could fully recover—the pandemic forced millions of workers to accommodate a workfrom-home schedule. Housing in America was already a battle between progressive organizers who see housing as a human right and greedy private investors who see housing as a good, but now rent and home prices have skyrocketed past what many can bear. Even upper-middle-class families are getting squeezed in many cities, while at the other end of the income ladder, a crisis of homelessness is festering.

Traditional American solutions are generally focused on the private market and spurring competition. The government’s role is reactive to the whims of this sector.

It’s relegated to a helpless position that can only perpetuate broken cycles. As a result, many have been sold the idea that people should either buy a home or live in an apartment owned by a private landlord, and that the government itself should then grudgingly run a few units for the poor.

Yet there is another solution that addresses the crisis much more directly: social housing. Rather than American-style public housing, which is reserved for the lowest incomes, this housing would be open to everyone. Housing supply would be delivered to the people who need it most urgently—which is to say, all people.

Ultimately, housing would become a right for all. To fight for this goal, the culture must disabuse itself of the notion that there are some people unworthy of government-owned housing—whether it’s marginalized groups like the poor or even the upper middle class. American society must renounce the presumption that there 10 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

are people who cannot or should not live in proximity to each other. All people can cohabitate; what’s more, everyone must for a truly equitable future to be within grasp.

Two big problems arise from relying nearly exclusively on private developers and landlords for housing. The first is that building happens in erratic surges depending on the business cycle, not the needs of the American people. Millions of homes were built during the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, but after the financial crisis, construction collapsed, and by 2009 new construction for privately owned homes was at its lowest point ever. As Business Insider reported,

the U.S. has not had a return to those prerecession highs since.

Need for housing was not down during the post-recession years; on the contrary, the population continued to grow. Private builders, however, had no incentive to flood the market with new properties because it took the U.S. multiple years to fully recover economically. When full employment was finally approached, there were few affordable properties available, and so prices began to rise dramatically, eventually increasing 35 percent over the course of the decade.

In 2020, the pandemic caused increased demand and also boosted building costs, causing another 20 percent price increase.

And now, long before the massive construction backlog has been addressed, another market downturn may already be started. In June, the Federal Reserve raised its federal funds interest rate by 0.75 percent—the biggest hike since 1994—and more may come. As a result, mortgage interest rates increased from about 3 percent to nearly 6 percent in just a few months, and new home starts are plummeting.

The second problem is that the incentive for the private market to build housing is maximizing profit, not meeting the needs of the people. Many people do not have the income necessary for the housing they need—and others can’t afford any housing at all. The result, particularly in cities like San Francisco and New York, where highincome job growth outstrips new housing construction, is that developers cater almost exclusively to the luxury market.

Public housing is already a vital source of low-income housing across the country, particularly in New York City. It is owned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and operated by local public-housing authorities. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, about 1.8 million families live in these legacy units.

But there are problems here too. First, because the units are provided below cost, they require an outside subsidy to build and maintain that is often cut when conservatives are in power, or during hard economic times. This is why America’s public-housing stock is reportedly some $80 billion behind in maintenance and investment.

Second, public housing in the U.S. has been exclusively for the low-income (typically below 80 percent of the local median income).

That, coupled with the often poor quality and bad reputation of public housing, means that

in many cities housing projects are de facto reserved for poor African Americans (helped along by chronically racist mortgage finance institutions). As many have noted, including the Prospect in 2012, public housing was built in already low-income, Black neighborhoods. The concentration of poverty begets poverty, so that eventually public housing in America became associated with dilapidated, neglected, overcrowded high-rises.

Today, public housing is just 1 percent of the housing market.

Social housing addresses all of these problems. The idea is simply public housing for all. For example, a municipality might have an apartment building in which a third of the units were deeply subsidized for lowincome people, a third provided at cost for the middle class, and a third at the market rate open to anyone. Every segment of the

BETH A . KEISER / AP PHOTO

The demolition of public housing in Chicago’s Cabrini Green. Federal law caps public housing to the amount available in 1999.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

S T C E P S PRO housing market, from top to bottom, would get more supply simultaneously.

Such a building would not require a subsidy to operate, since maintenance could be funded by the second two classes of units (how much depends on the market). Rents could be kept as low as possible because the government doesn’t require a profit margin. Construction could also be financed by floating a bond against expected future revenues, so construction could be greatly scaled up without requiring any direct government financing.

Finally, a large social-housing sector would stabilize the construction industry. The best time to build would naturally be during an economic downturn, when labor, land, and materials are relatively cheap. So instead of homes being built in boom/bust cycles, causing labor shortages for construction companies followed by bankruptcies and mass layoffs, there would be a steady, constant rate of building and employment. This would also help stabilize the rest of the economy.

Social housing can be those traditional, multifamily high-rises, but it can be any other form as well. Most importantly, social housing will not be stigmatized, incomerestricted, or run-down.

In Vienna, whose mixedincome Seestadt Aspern development is pictured here, 3 in 5 residents live in public housing.

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And this isn’t some theoretical idea either.

In fact, social housing exists in a number of ways across the world, with varying successes and failures. Vienna has had particularly strong success, where 3 in 5 residents live in public housing.

As Peter Dreier, professor of public policy at Occidental College, wrote for the Prospect in 2018, since at least 1922, the Viennese government has deliberately grown its share of housing stock. In addition, the government provides communal spaces such as “kindergartens, nurseries, mothers’ advice centers, courtyards, health clinics …” while maintaining properties on its dime for a small fraction of a family’s income.

A large socialhousing sector would stabilize the construction industry.

Vienna’s success can also be attributed to the government adopting a mixed-income model for social housing that eventually made social housing accessible to all. The legacy continues today, as Dreier continued: “Vienna today has about 800,000 housing units. The municipality is Vienna’s largest landlord.”

Good things rarely come easy. Some changes would be needed for a full-fledged national social-housing program. A big issue is the Faircloth Amendment, implemented under the Clinton administration at the behest of the GOP. It was a part of a larger package of welfare reform enacted with the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (1998). This specific amendment puts a cap on how many public-housing units can be built by pegging it to the amount of public housing available in 1999. Essentially, for traditional public housing to be built, it has to be destroyed. Repealing this sordid law would be an important step in any revitalization of government-owned housing.

However, states or cities still can and sometimes do maneuver around Faircloth. So long as a social-housing scheme does not require a federal subsidy—like the one detailed above— Faircloth would not apply. Indeed, Montgomery County in Maryland has even built out a few projects along these lines.

There are also other options available to the country in the interim. One is the idea of community land trusts, nonprofit bodies that govern housing, and sometimes communal spaces, in a given area, made up of community members. There are at least 225 in the country. Land can be managed by the people who actually live there, giving more people a say in their living conditions and likely increasing the longevity of property.

At any rate, a social-housing program would take time to come to fruition, and the population will not be easily disabused of the notion of housing as a commodity.

But that’s the beauty of big ideas. The housing status quo, where about a third of the population spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and 15 percent more than half their income, is not working.

Far too much of the national wealth disappears into the pockets of idle landlords. Far too many people are homeless. Big problems require big solutions—that’s how housing becomes a right. n

Abolish State Senates

What the country needs is 50 majority-rule unicameral state legislatures.

By Harold Meyerson At first glance, California state Sen. Richard Richards might have seemed an exceptionally powerful lawmaker in 1960. The justcompleted census revealed that Los Angeles County, home to just over six million people, constituted a whopping 38.4 percent of the entire state’s population. So Richards, as the county’s sole senator, could speak for more than one-third of the state’s residents.

At second glance, however, Richards was no more than a legislative pip-squeak—and, more distressingly, so was Los Angeles. California, like virtually every other state, had shaped its upper house in the image of the U.S. Senate, apportioning its seats not by population but by jurisdiction. Every county was entitled to no more than one senator.

As California’s senate had just 40 seats, but the state itself had 58 counties, the smallest counties had to buddy up to get the total down to 40, but that still meant that a senator representing a district with roughly 6,000 residents could, on any given measure, cast the same number of votes (one) as Richards, who represented six million.

That disturbed the U.S. Supreme Court, then under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren and in an uncommonly egalitarian frame of mind. In Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that equality under the law meant that state legislatures had to be governed by districts of equal population. No longer could senators from two all-but-unpopulated Sierra Nevada districts outvote the one senator from teeming, gridlocked L.A. In short order, California reshaped its Senate so that roughly one-third of its members came from L.A. County, and all the other states (except Nebraska, which already had a unicameral legislature) did likewise.

The Court’s one-person-one-vote doctrine became the law of the land. And in the process, state senates became entirely redundant.

Just how redundant becomes apparent from a survey of the partisan makeup

of each of the legislative bodies in the 49 states with both a house and a senate. In 47 of those states, one party controls both houses, often by very similar margins. (In California, for instance, three-fourths of the members of each house are Democrats; one-fourth, accordingly, are Republicans.)

In only two states—Minnesota and Virginia—does one party control one house and the other party control the other, but in both states, the margins are minimal, and could easily move to one-party control at the next election.

Since the 1960s, as the identities of the two parties have grown radically dissimilar, fewer and fewer voters split their tickets. And as the electorate has become more polarized, that polarization has taken on a spatial dimension, with cities becoming more Democratic, rural areas more Republican, and suburbs experiencing more polarized voting as well. As senate districts in some states are overlaid atop assembly districts, the partisan makeup of both are largely the same.

Nor is there an appreciable difference in AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

S T C E P S PRO the job functions of the legislative chambers. For example, the most significant differences between the U.S. House and Senate are that the Senate ratifies treaties with other nations and confirms Supreme Court and other federal judicial nominees. But treaty ratification isn’t an option for state senates, and for most of them, neither is judicial confirmation. In most states, judges are elected. Only in Maine and New Jersey does the Senate confirm supreme court selections nominated by the governor, and only New Jersey gives senators sole confirmation powers for other judicial nominees.

Many state senates do confirm cabinet appointments not elected by voters. But in general, both state legislative chambers vote on the same matters and represent the same areas with roughly the same percentages. The nation’s hyper-partisan legislative landscape today makes state senate redundancy even more obvious than it was when the Court issued its Reynolds decision 58 years ago.

And yet the number of states with two legislative houses is the same as it was in 1964: 49.

This is not at all surprising. Legislators,

The statehouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, America’s only unicameral state legislature.

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like most people, are disinclined to vote themselves out of a job. Republicans (and Democrats of a Scrooge-like disposition) may bemoan government profligacy at every turn, but when did you ever hear them call for consolidating legislatures into a single body?

Besides, having two separate houses has proven to be an effective way of shielding the business of lawmaking, or law-derailing, from the public’s eye. Key provisions can morph into something quite different or disappear altogether in transit between the houses, or in conference committees where versions are reconciled and where powerful interests can make behind-closed-doors power plays. Such things can and do happen in unicameral legislatures, too, of course, but the gratuitous complexity that comes with having two houses does the cause of transparency no favors.

Not surprisingly, the transformation of

Nebraska’s legislature to unicameral came at the hands of voters, in the election of 1934. The change would likely never have been made but for the nearly dozen-year campaign for unicameralism waged by the state’s remarkable U.S. senator, George Norris, whose other notable achievements include federal legislation outlawing court injunctions against strikes (the NorrisLaGuardia Act) and, as a passionate public power advocate, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which he championed for years before Franklin Roosevelt became president and pushed Congress to enact it.

Norris’s case for unicameralism was similarly progressive. Bicameralism, he argued, was an 18th-century transposition to American soil of the British Parliament.

Like the House of Lords, the U.S. Senate—whose members were chosen by state legislatures until the popular vote requirement of the 17th Amendment, enacted in 1913—was initially devised to enable a quasi-aristocracy to tamp down the popular sentiments of the lower house’s hoi polloi.

A body so conceived, Norris contended, ran against the American grain, particular-

ly for state legislatures, whose creation had required no equivalent to the compromise between small and large states that created a bicameral Congress at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. “The constitutions of our various states,” Norris declared, “are built upon the idea that there is but one class. If this be true, there is no sense or reason in having the same thing done twice, especially if it is to be done by two bodies of men elected in the same way and having the same jurisdiction.” Which, of course, became even more the case after the Warren Court’s rulings.

It’s hard to quantify whether Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, overlaid as it is by nonpartisanship, is uniquely effective. But for what it’s worth, by one measure constructed by Politico, it did supply the best U.S. response to the COVID pandemic. And its model of deliberative engagement, with no partisan caucuses and with all lawmakers able to participate at any stage of a bill’s passage, is substantially more democratic than most legislatures’.

Another positive for a unicameral legislature is that you can make districts more compact and closer to the people. In California, for example, eliminating the 40 state senators could be paired with increasing the state assembly’s size from 80 to 120, cutting district populations by one-third while not adding a single legislator.

All that said, the stupefying superfluousness of state senates is far from the worst problem that the form of our legislatures poses to our nation. The greater danger to the core democratic principle of majority rule involves gerrymandering in singlemember districts.

Note, please, that Pennsylvania voted for the Democrat in the last presidential election, has a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator, but also a heavily Republican legislature, due to the gerrymandered districts those Republicans created. Michigan also voted for Biden, has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, and a gerrymandered Republican legislature. In these and other states, even when a majority of voters cast their ballots for Democrats, Republicans can control the legislature and, through district line-drawing, the congressional delegation as well.

Gerrymandering is only part of the story here. Over the past year, even several states with officially nonpartisan redistricting

The fundamental flaw in American democracy is the absence of any guarantee for majority rule. commissions have seen partisan interests on those commissions or in the courts unveil blatantly partisan maps, a reflection of just how pervasive partisanship has become in every sphere of public life.

Even without gerrymandering, though, the presence of overwhelming numbers of Democrats in urban districts means that Democrats can use those numbers to amass statewide majorities, while more broadly dispersed Republicans can claim a larger number of legislative and congressional districts.

That is why, as Jonathan Rodden wrote in his 2019 book Why Cities Lose, “Underrepresentation of the urban left in national legislatures and governments has been a basic feature of all industrialized countries that use winner-take-all district [elections].”

A clean solution to this problem would be to simply eliminate the whole idea of districts, and have the composition of state legislative bodies determined by state voters as a whole through proportional-representation elections. That’s how parliaments in many democratic nations are constituted.

But after more than 200 years of Americans being represented by their local representative, it’s unlikely to the point of impossibility that voters would warm to this idea.

Other nations have managed to square this circle by combining district representation with the proportional kind. Both Germany and New Zealand are governed by “mixed-member” parliaments, some of whom are elected in district elections and some of whom are elected by proportional representation. Voters in those nations vote twice: once for their district representative and once for their preferred party, each of which has a list of parliamentary candidates.

If 55 percent of the nation’s voters vote for party X, then the candidates from party X’s list would constitute 55 percent of the par-

liament’s at-large members, with the same voting rights as the district representatives.

It used to be commonplace American folk wisdom that voters usually “vote for the person, not the party.” But if ever there’s been a time when party definition was so sharp that that was no longer true, that time is now. And this mix of district and proportional representation is not as foreign a concept as you might think: Ten states use some form of multimember districts for at least a portion of their state legislatures.

And this November, a form of proportional representation will be put to a vote in Portland, Oregon. If the measure passes, the city council will expand to 12 members, consisting of three winners from each of the four new geographic districts.

In general, significantly changing the legislative system would have to either come from the electorate via an initiative, or begin with a Democratic legislature and then be put before the voters as a referendum. (New Zealand adopted its system only after voters approved it in 1996.) Only 26 states have an initiative or referendum process, but in a state like Michigan, which does have that option and where Democrats usually win statewide but are locked into minority status in the legislature, the party should begin the work of persuading voters to move to a hybrid mode of representation.

The need for such a change cannot be overstated. It becomes clearer with each passing day that the fundamental flaw in American democracy is the absence of any guarantee for majority rule. George W. Bush and Donald Trump were both elected president while losing the popular vote. Five of the nation’s Supreme Court justices were nominated by those minoritarian presidents and confirmed by an unrepresentative Senate. Today’s Republican Party is doing all it can to bolster the minority rule that enables it to govern.

By themselves, states can’t remake the structure of the federal government. But by moving to unicameral legislatures and hybrid representation, they can ensure majority rule at the state level, further better representation at the U.S. House level, and perhaps even lay the groundwork for bringing equal representation to the federal level, as the Warren Court did to the states.

Senates are redundant. Legislatures based solely on single-member districts are antimajoritarian. Let’s scrap them both. n AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

S T C E P S PRO

A Four-Day Week at Five Days’ Pay Workers (and their families) are stressed by the long hours they have to put in. It’s past time to cut those hours.

By Sarah Jaffe When organizer and researcher Aidan Harper first began advocating for a four-day workweek in Britain, six or seven years back, he remembers being treated like a novelty act, like surfing dogs.

Over the past couple of years, though, things have changed. Now, governments across Europe are backing trials of shorter workweeks, companies are offering it as a 16 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

perk, and when he is invited on the radio, instead of being mocked, he’s earnestly asked how it will work.

A shorter workweek was long a part of the agenda for the left and the labor movement, and seemed to be common sense. In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” first published in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that over the next century, the workweek would fall to just 15 hours. Instead, workers have

seen productivity diverge from pay, rising inequality, and for many Americans, increased work hours.

Can we reverse that trend, and reclaim some of our time? A growing number of labor organizers and advocates around the world say we can.

Juliet Schor, economist at Boston College and author of The Overworked American, has been trying to figure out how to shorten our working hours since the 1990s. In the last few years, she’s found people more receptive to the idea. “It feels like now, a four-day week has become common sense, whereas five years ago, it would have felt maybe nice but impossible.”

The pandemic has helped bring about that shift. COVID-19 completely upended many people’s relationship to their job. We realized that nothing about how we work is immutable—it can change, and change quickly. During the pandemic, it mostly changed for the worse. The workweek, studies found, stretched out longer for the work-from-home brigades, while in-person workers found themselves doing forced overtime to make up for colleagues’ illnesses and chronic understaffing. This was a key issue in major strikes at Nabisco, John Deere, and Stanford Hospital.

The high levels of stress and burnout that workers have been feeling through the COVID waves, Schor said, are leading to new interest in shorter hours. With companies having trouble recruiting and retaining talent, some employers have begun to think, “OK, a four-day week with more of an output-based focus rather than a time-based focus could be feasible.”

For decades, the American labor movement made the struggle for a shorter workday and workweek—with no loss in pay—central to its demands. The fight for a ten-hour and then eight-hour day linked workers across the country and industries, across race and gender lines. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was the slogan of the eighthour movement. Political theorist Kathi Weeks reminds us that a big part of the demand was always for pleasure, for fun, for leisure time. The movement for shorter hours, she wrote, “can also serve to provoke an interrogation of the basic structure of work and the needs, desires, and expectations that are attached to it.”

It is just such an interrogation that the pandemic has restarted.

When Juliet Schor released The Overworked American in 1992, with the subtitle The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, she recalled it not being terribly controversial to say that we should work less. But public policy went in the opposite direction.

Instead of shorter hours, people were compelled to work longer as wages stagnated.

The 2008 financial crisis revived the idea a bit, but mostly in Europe, where employees worked shorter hours as part of jobsharing programs that limited the scope of unemployment.

In the 2019 election, the British Labour Party put the four-day week at the center of its policy agenda.

But after its devastating loss, the party retreated into mush-mouthedness. Today, U.K. activists are doing their work outside of the party.

In the U.S., the AFL-CIO adopted a resolution at this June’s convention that states “the AFL-CIO will aggressively take up the fight for a shorter workweek and earlier retirement in the arena of education, collective bargaining and legislative initiatives, and will work with like-minded allies in these efforts.”

The most exciting developments in the movement right now are the four-dayweek trials. They’re organized by a coalition including the organization 4 Day Week Global and researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Boston College; Schor is one of the lead researchers. The first trial began in February, and includes companies with workers in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the U.S. The official U.S. trial started April 1st; the British trial began June 6th. More trials are planned for 2023.

The team recruits companies to sign up for the trial, which includes a series of workshops to help them transition. The trials use a “100-80-100” model, which means 100 percent of pay for 80 percent of time, attempting to maintain 100 percent of productivity. The researchers survey the companies before the trial starts, collecting data on performance metrics at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the six-month trial.

“We’re going to be putting together the largest-ever database of impacts and outcomes for four-day weeks,” Schor said.

Kyle Lewis, co-director of Autonomy, a London-based think tank helping to run the British trial, said, “We were hoping to get maybe 20 to 30 companies signed up to it.

Initially we had 500 to 600 companies come along to the welcome events.” Seventy companies, with over 3,000 employees, eventually signed on. Those companies range from a fish-and-chip shop to small manufacturers to marketing to care work. In the U.S., the companies include a restaurant chain and a number of tech companies; the bestknown enrollee is probably Kickstarter, while the best-known to political junkies is Run for Something.

While there is no data for the official U.S. trial yet, Schor did have some results from three months of the February 1st trial.

Workers, she said, are experiencing “less burnout, less stress, better physical health, better mental health, people sleeping more, people having higher life satisfaction.”

Another thing she’s seen, though, is that working hours have not fallen by a full eight hours. “Some of the open-ended comments suggest that it sometimes takes people a little bit of time to extract themselves from a five-day week.” But the vast majority have gone to a 32-hour, Fridays-off schedule. At a company called Healthwise, Schor said, when a customer service employee told her clients she’d no longer be available on Fridays, “their reaction was, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic. Congratulations.’” Just that response “feels like such a sea change.”

Participation in these trials is coming from the top, from managers and owners willing to sign their company up, though Schor noted, “Management is responding to where they think workers are at. I think there’s a generational demand here, because the younger generations have been more

Stress and burnout that workers have been feeling through the COVID waves are leading to new interest in shorter hours.

vocal in their desire for a four-day week.”

Management’s case for the four-day week is far from the only one. “We’ve made the case from an environmental standpoint,” Lewis said, “made the case from thinking about it in terms of gender equality or the trade union’s perspective and how it can enhance workers’ lives.”

Eventually, Schor said, legislation will be required to implement a four-day week, as it was to establish the eight-hour day. “Companies are not going to do this voluntarily en masse,” she said. She’s heartened by government involvement in organizing or subsidizing trials, as in Spain, where the trial is forthcoming, and Iceland, where a government-backed trial took place between 2015 and 2019. There’s an incentive for governments, Schor noted, because the four-day week can have “social benefits that aren’t going to be captured by the individual companies, whether that’s impacts on family life or community or decarbonization.”

In the U.S., Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA) proposed a bill last July that would not mandate a four-day week but would require overtime to be paid beginning at 32 hours instead of the current 40. The Congressional Progressive Caucus backed the bill, but it has yet to move, and Takano’s office did not return a request for comment.

It isn’t easy to revamp the workweek—particularly when the biggest change in working time in recent years has been the shift back to what is essentially piecework: the gig economy. Schor noted that while gig work doesn’t lend itself to time-based innovation, gig workers might get paid more once employees are paid five days’ wages for four days’ work.

Questions like these lead Aidan Harper, who now works as an organizer with Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), to stress the importance of workers leading the fight for a shorter workweek. IWGB represents gig workers, outsourced workers, and foster parents, as well as those more traditionally employed. “If we’re honest,” Harper said, “bosses and workers can’t both always win out. They have conflicting interests and working time is one of those.”

Many employers aren’t likely to be persuaded that shorter hours can increase productivity. While burnout and illness increase turnover, which has a cost, we have AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

S T C E P S PRO seen in the strikes at Nabisco, Kellogg, and elsewhere the degree to which employers rely on pushing workers to labor for longer and longer hours.

Both Schor and Harper noted that in certain kinds of work—health care being a big one—budget cuts have led to absurdly long hours. “It’s not that doctors and nurses have to go to too many meetings,” Schor said. “It’s that there aren’t enough of them, the pace is too high already, they’re too stressed.”

While reducing burnout would have some effect on efficiency in care, the reality is that what is needed is massive investment—and hiring—in these industries. “I think we have to be a bit more honest with the fact that in those types of work, it does need additional investment, and that will have to come from either increased taxation or moving money around in the economy in a way that benefits more people,” Harper said. “Or in a private company, it will have to come from profit margins.”

Autonomy’s Lewis also worries that companies might offer a shorter workweek, but in reality just speed up the pace of work and squeeze their staff harder. The shorter week has to come alongside things like the right to disconnect (in order to make sure workers aren’t just being forced to pick up the slack at home) and adequate government monitoring of work conditions inside factories.

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A strike at Deliveroo in London. Britain is currently engaged in the largest four-day workweek trial in the world. reports indicating that a shorter working week would be good for the climate, and Schor aims to focus more on this issue in her research. She points out that the biggest climate benefits will happen if the fourday week jump-starts an ongoing process of working time reduction. “I think this needs to be at the center of how we’re thinking about transforming our economy and soci-

ety in ways that decarbonize but that also make people better off,” she said.

In sum, Lewis noted, a shorter working week is only going to come into being if a variety of actors and movements push for it from all angles. “We need those multiple fronts making the case. There has to be a range of different movements putting pressure on for this to happen.” n

STEFAN ROUSSEAU / AP PHOTO

For many workers, a four-day week even at five days’ pay will still not pay enough. A shorter working week at one job might just create more time to try to squeeze in another, or some gig work. Getting to a shorter week for those at low wage levels will require significant wage increases, and an end to companies’ misclassification of workers as independent contractors so the companies can dodge wage and hour law.

To win the shorter week in industries without benevolent bosses (i.e., most of them), or in labor-intensive fields where workers are the only cost to be cut, in other words, it’s going to take a much stronger labor movement than the one we currently have. “Historically, the trade union movement has always been strongest and most dynamic when it’s organized around working time,” Harper said.

Shorter hours could also be a cause where the labor and climate movements could find common ground. Autonomy has published

Cut Off Private Equity’s Money Spigot A variety of legislative and regulatory actions would make it hard for private equity to stay in business. That should be the goal.

By David Dayen It is genuinely hard to find a more destructive economic force in America today than the private equity industry. It encompasses all of the negative trends that have undermined living standards for the broad mass of citizens since the Reagan era: the escalating share of national income going to finance, the rise of market concentration, the contempt for workers, the yawning gap between rich and poor.

The biggest private equity firms buy up companies with borrowed money and load them with debt. While fund managers extract cash through fees and financial engineering, the companies struggle to pay off these new obligations on their balance sheet. The subsequent cost-cutting of jobs, wages, and pension plans can be seen as a direct transfer from labor to capital, with the financiers growing impossibly rich while everyone else suffers.

The leveraged-buyout era has immiserated labor, dampened productive investment, and degraded the experience of workers, customers, and the larger economy. We should ameliorate this suffering by ending private equity as we know it.

Right now, that seems like a fantasy.

The industry is entrenched in housing and health care and energy and retail and restaurants. It’s involved in far more obscure markets, from Nielsen ratings to Smarte Carts at the airport to voting machines to Plan B, the morning-after pill. As of 2020, companies owned by private equity directly employed 11.7 million employees, comprising roughly 1 out of every 13 U.S. workers.

Cheap money issued during the pandemic likely expanded that further, producing a record number of buyout deals.

But the market downturn in 2022, the ebbing power of the industry, and the grow-

ing awareness of its perverse impact on the economy present an opportunity to rethink how easy America makes it for predatory financiers to thrive. At every level of the private equity experience—from fundraising to acquisitions to exits—we either subsidize the industry’s business model, facilitate its war chest, or allow firms to

separate actions from consequences. If we focused attention on turning off the fire hose of money flowing into the biggest firms, the worst elements of private equity could be a thing of the past. Here’s how.

Private equity firms raise funds from several different sources. But after the industry tem-

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

S T C E P S PRO institutional investors with over $25 million in assets. This opened a new funding base, which happily rushed in, seduced by the prospect of outsized returns. A decade later, in 2006, there was $375 billion in private equity acquisitions, 18 times the amount of just three years earlier.

So the first way to reduce the involvement of private equity in every aspect of our lives would be to repeal Section 209 of NSMIA. This would both reduce the amount of available capital in each fund and limit private equity’s more attractive options.

For example, firms have sought to get their investments into 401(k) plans, offering themselves to small investors for the first time. The Department of Labor has tried to put a stop to this. But if PE funds fall under the 100-investor rule, it wouldn’t be worth it to them to tap retail investors.

The bigger deal here is it would kick most institutional investors out of the private equity game, leaving them much better off.

Contrary to private equity’s claims, their long-term performance does not beat the public equity market, as a 2020 study by Ludovic Phalippou showed. The business is good at minting the billionaires who run

private equity firms, but less so at enriching its partner investors. Despite this, public pension fund exposure to alternative investments has risen to more than 30 percent.

These are the retirement dollars of ordinary workers funding the decimation of ordinary workers. Saving pension funds from themselves should be a public-policy goal.

Limiting future fundraising won’t affect the current cash pile, which surged over the past year. Firms are sitting on an estimated $2.3 trillion in “dry powder,” which refers to money not yet deployed. So in addition to dampening fundraising, there need to be prescriptions for the rest of the private equity cycle.

For instance, when a PE firm buys a company, it should be subject to merger review.

The new antitrust regimes at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have raised concerns about firms’ ability to roll up smaller players and bolt them onto one company, giving them dominance in an industry while making the acquisitions small enough to avoid merger reviews.

Both Jonathan Kanter, head of the Antitrust Division of DOJ, and FTC chair Lina

Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, has been among the companies obtaining funding through life insurance annuities.

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MARK LENNIHAN / AP PHOTO

porarily collapsed amid Michael Milken’s prosecution in the late 1980s, institutional investors like public pension funds and university endowments drove the return to prominence. That support can be traced to one law signed by President Bill Clinton. It’s called the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 (NSMIA), and its impact has been almost totally forgotten to history.

The Investment Company Act of 1940 required investment funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, with regular reporting requirements, prohibitions on certain transactions, and restrictions on leverage (the use of large amounts of debt). Only investment firms that limited themselves to under 100 investors could avoid the 1940 Act restrictions.

The leverage restrictions alone—investment companies must carry asset coverage of $3 for every $1 of borrowing—would make the private equity business model largely impossible, so firms kept under 100 investors per fund. But Section 209 of NSMIA allowed exceptions for funds with over 100 investors, as long as they were “qualified purchasers,” defined as either individuals with $5 million or more in investments or

The tools exist today to stop private equity, in a law written 82 years ago.

Khan have vowed to scrutinize private equity more closely when they buy assets available in a divestiture, raising challenges that previously flew under the radar. Both have also brought claims that certain private equity acquisitions are anti-competitive. This could hinder rollup deals that are among the most dangerous. You know they’re onto something because the industry and its allies have angrily objected.

Presumably, some deals would still get through. Right now, PE managers can siphon value from portfolio companies without caring whether they live or die. One of the most popular methods is through management fees or dividends, really just cash payments from companies to fund managers.

In addition to a strategy to prevent new acquisitions, we also need one to prevent corporate pillaging. Some politicians have proposed a moratorium on dividends for the first two years after a purchase, so PE firms can’t immediately strip a company for parts. More broadly, if you made private equity firms and their general partners jointly liable for any debt they place on a portfolio company, they’d have to think much more deeply about their activities.

“That’s the stake through the heart,” said Eileen Appelbaum, one of America’s most careful observers of private equity.

Joint liability would get PE firms to actually fear the risk of bankruptcy in one of their portfolio companies. Ten of the fourteen largest retail bankruptcies between 2012 and 2019 came from private equity– owned companies. As the pandemic began, private equity was responsible for more than half of the corporate defaults in the U.S. economy.

An obscure case now in U.S. bankruptcy court gives a sense of the threat. Creditors at Toys ‘R’ Us, which was bought by multiple private equity firms in 2005 and then driven into liquidation, are suing former executives and directors over spending too much

money after filing for bankruptcy, as well as for paying advisory fees to PE managers in the years before liquidation.

The judge in the case said the claims could proceed, which resemble a joint liability situation where the PE firms would have to pay out to creditors. If the industry faced that with every company, there’s no question it would be more responsible in limiting leverage. Plus, if workers at PE-owned firms were guaranteed severance, that would also force financiers to pay more attention to actually making companies work well rather than extracting value at workers’ expense.

Federal Reserve tightening has cramped private equity in 2022. Fundraising targets have been lowered, and with interest rates up, leveraged buyouts are less likely.

What’s more, the value of portfolio companies is much lower than what PE firms bought them for. Because PE firms have to return cash to their investors on prescribed timelines, these “bad vintage” companies are going to cause a “terrible hangover,” as the Financial Times put it.

PE firms have dealt with this by hiding the real value of their portfolios from investors, or selling companies to other PE firms that need to spend cash, in overinflated private deals. In a new and confounding wrinkle, they are now selling companies to themselves. These “continuation funds,” which are affiliates of the original firm, allow high valuations and more fees for PE managers, with investors kept in the dark. A top asset manager in Europe was spurred to call private equity a “Ponzi scheme” because of this maneuver. It’s reflective of the headsI-win, tails-I-win mentality of the industry, which is able to find escape routes to avoid the pain of any negative consequence.

Joint liability could help fix this. So could a simple ban on continuation funds and other forms of self-dealing. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new private fund rules would mandate quarterly statements to investors that detail fund performance, and require firms that make deals involving continuation funds to supply a “fairness opinion” detailing prior business relationships. The proposed rule has earned support from financial-reform groups.

Stringent monitoring would also tamp down another private equity innovation.

The industry has recently taken to buying out life insurance companies for their annu-

ities, turning the prodigious assets under their control. Blackstone took a stake in Allstate Life Insurance Co., for example, in exchange for the ability to manage their assets. While this could evade fundraising limitations, it brings private equity under the scrutiny of state insurance commissioners, which could put in guardrails, like prohibiting annuity assets from flowing into risky investments like private equity deals.

Some of these proposals are in the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); some are not. Combined, they share the same goal of throwing kinks into private equity’s money hose. Putting PE back under the 100-investor rule would limit fundraising; enhancing merger review would make it harder to put the remaining money to use. The Warren bill mandates joint liability over debt and severance for laid-off workers, which would stick private equity with the consequences of their bad actions. It also limits financial extraction, like with a moratorium on early-stage dividends. Banning continuation funds and other forms of self-dealing would reduce the ways the industry seeks to engineer its own bailouts.

But the biggest single action to drive harmful private equity firms out of the economy would be to simply put all investment funds under the 1940 Act regulations with no exceptions, thereby limiting the leverage that is the mother’s milk of private equity.

The societal value of allowing PE firms to load debt on companies is questionable and the harms can be great. The tools exist today to stop it, in a law written 82 years ago.

Crushing private equity would leave a lot of small and startup companies in need of funding. But that’s what the traditional banking system is for. When private equity controls the means by which companies can acquire needed funds, it’s no wonder that the terms are so tilted in their favor. But more reputable lenders whose interests are aligned with the companies doing the borrowing would eliminate the current need for private equity in the marketplace.

If we’re going to achieve broadly shared prosperity, we need to break the cycle of cheap money fueling runaway speculation.

The goal should be to follow that money and keep it out of the hands of predators whose self-enrichment doesn’t correspond to society’s benefit. n AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

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Thinking Sectorally

Our current model of collective bargaining leaves millions of workers out in the cold. Sectoral bargaining could change all that—and, just maybe, rebuild our shrunken middle class.

By Isabelle Gius The outlook for the labor movement in America is at once bleak and hopeful. On one hand, the number of workers belonging to or represented by unions continues to decline. In 2021, a meager 6.1 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a union, and union coverage overall stood at 11.6 percent. Income inequality is the highest it has ever been, and the power differential between labor and management, coupled with the weaknesses of U.S. labor law, enables employers to engage in rampant union-busting and retaliation with minimal penalties. Just when they are needed most, unions seem nearly at risk of extinction.

On the other hand, a wave of grassroots labor organizing has gained traction across the country at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, Trader Joe’s, and beyond. Sixty-eight percent of Americans support unions, the highest level since 1965, and the number is even higher among young people. Almost half of non-unionized workers say they would join a union if they had the chance.

“I believe we may be on the verge of an era of mass organizing like we have not seen since the 1930s,” Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) said in a statement to the Prospect.

Hoping to build upon this promising momentum, union organizers and labor experts are thinking big. Facing a legal and political environment rife with fragmentation, exclusion, and sluggishness, major structural change to the relationship between workers and companies may be the only way to tip the scales in workers’ favor.

That’s where sectoral bargaining comes in.

Sectoral bargaining is a form of collective bargaining where workers bargain with multiple employers in order to set standards across an entire industry or sector. Negotiated benefits and wages apply to all workers across the sector, regardless of whether or not they are unionized.

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As it stands, labor law in the United States emphasizes bargaining at the enterprise level—or more accurately, bargaining at individual workplaces or even subsets of workplaces. At the same time, the holes that have been punched in the law over the past half-century make it extremely difficult for workers to build power at the workplace level and allow for intense employer opposition—though President Biden’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board are trying to fill some of those holes. A sectoral system would address the limits of

enterprise-level bargaining, change what it means to organize, and lead to significant improvements in workers’ conditions.

Sectoral bargaining’s critical promise is to deliver the benefits of unionization to all workers, whether union members or not.

Even at the height of their postwar power, when they represented roughly a third of the workforce, American unions were never able to set standards for the majority of American workers. The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t extend collective-bargaining rights to domestic workers, agricultural workers,

and independent contractors, who are disproportionately women, people of color, and immigrants. Over the past several decades, the share of workers classified or misclassified as independent contractors has grown considerably, so that today, 46 percent of the American workforce doesn’t have a legal right to join a union. Sectoral bargaining is a way to cover those workers who are hardest to reach, reducing inequality to a significantly greater extent than workplace-level bargaining and helping to close gender and racial pay gaps in the process.

Sectoral bargaining is particularly effective in industries that are highly fissured, with layers of subcontracting, franchising, and outsourcing to so-called independent contractors. New Deal–era labor law misses this crucial aspect of our modern economy.

Organizing at the workplace level is incapable of addressing the problems of fissured employment, which deliberately obscures power and responsibility to the benefit of corporations. Bargaining at the sectoral level, however, is able to hold these multinational employers accountable. It’s the difference between McDonald’s employees bargaining with their local franchisee, and fast-food employees across the country bargaining with the McDonald’s Corporation and the other fast-food giants. Only the latter is able to tackle the root of exploitation.

Sectoral bargaining also has the potential to disincentivize employer opposition to unionization. Under our current bargaining system, companies compete with each other over wages, and most managers thus believe that unionization will put them at a competitive disadvantage. Sectoral bargaining takes wages out of competition, requiring all companies in a sector to follow the same rules and adhere to the same standards, thus preventing a race to the bottom that pits workers against one another and drives down wages and living standards.

Employers then have to compete based on other factors, such as greater productivity or the quality of their product. With sectoral bargaining, as Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, explained: “You don’t have workers bearing the full burden of the competitiveness that is inherent in capitalism.”

Sectoral bargaining is not a replacement for union organizing at the enterprise level.

Each type of bargaining can complement and strengthen the other. Indeed, countries

Sectoral bargaining’s critical promise is to deliver the benefits of unionization to all workers. with sectoral bargaining tend to have higher union density than countries without it.

Proponents of sectoral bargaining emphasize that it should be accompanied by other reforms to give workers power at all levels.

A robust system of workplace bargaining can promote solidarity in ways that sectoral bargaining cannot, and there will always be workplace-specific issues to be addressed that are outside the scope of sectoral agreements.

Sectoral bargaining sets a floor for workplace organizing to build upon. And ensuring that unions have sufficient power and membership strengthens the deals that sectoral bargaining structures are able to negotiate.

The experience of Amazon workers in two different countries illustrates the difference that sectoral bargaining can make.

In April of this year, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island won a historic unionization vote, the first in the country. Their path to a collective-bargaining agreement is uncertain, however, as Amazon is using all of its muscle to attempt to overturn the result. In Italy, by contrast, unions signed a national collective-bargaining agreement with Amazon last September. The first-of-its-kind contract and its follow-on agreements cover temporary workers and last-mile delivery, recognize unions as workers’ legitimate representatives, and create a framework for establishing firm-level standards.

Italy’s sectoral bargaining system was a crucial factor in enabling the agreement, writes David Madland, author of Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States.

“Italy’s sectoral bargaining system facilitated worker activism, anchored discussions, and reduced Amazon’s opposition to an agreement.” A similar agreement in the

U.S. seems unthinkable today, but sectoral bargaining could get us there.

America is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to sectoral bargaining. Countries across the globe have various sectoral systems, from Argentina to Norway, South Africa to Germany. In some nations, like France, the government ensures that key collective bargaining contracts in a given industry are extended to all of the industry’s employees. Elsewhere, where unions are stronger, legally mandated extension is not always necessary.

There have been several examples of sectoral bargaining in U.S. history, too, beginning with wage boards in the Progressive Era, preceding and during World War I. These boards were designed to set standards for workers without union representation or citizenship rights, and they existed in over a dozen states and Washington, D.C. In some states, they still exist.

The New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act, War Labor Board, and Fair Labor Standards Act legalized various sectoral bargaining agreements and committees.

There has also been “pattern bargaining” in powerful, highly unionized industries like the auto industry of yore, where the United Auto Workers would strike (or threaten to strike) one of the Big Three companies and win a contract that the other two would then accept. But this arrangement eroded over time, as foreign competition and factories in the non-union South weakened the UAW’s bargaining power. Today, there are disparities among its agreements with the Big Three automakers. In a few industries that employ hard-to-replace workers with special talents—movies, television, majorleague sports—sectoral bargaining persists.

To make sectoral bargaining work in a sustainable way at the local, state, and national level, active government involvement is essential. Creating tripartite wage boards (with worker, business, and public representatives) and expanding upon existing prevailing-wage laws are just some of the steps that policymakers could take. At the federal level, the idea has at least been raised: In the 2020 Democratic primaries, candidates from Pete Buttigieg to Bernie Sanders developed their own sectoral proposals. Even Joe Biden promised to explore the concept. But with the PRO Act stalled, the possibilities for federal labor law reform in the short term range from slim to none.

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In 2015, a New York wage board increased minimum wages for all of the state’s fast-food workers to $15 an hour.

Experiments at the state and local level, however, have begun—at least, where Democrats govern and unions are strong. These experiments are constrained by federal preemption, which prevents localities from enacting labor law, so they are not exactly sectoral bargaining. Rather than bargaining a contract, these efforts enable sectoral standard-setting that must ultimately be approved by the legislature or executive.

In 2015, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo convened a wage board to examine wages in the fast-food industry, which resulted in an increase in the minimum wage paid to fast-food workers to $15 an hour, to be phased in over six years. More recently and ambitiously, California’s AB 257, the FAST Recovery Act, would establish a Fast Food Sector Council with worker, franchisee, company, and state representatives charged with negotiating industrywide minimum standards. The bill passed the Assembly earlier this year and will be up for a Senate vote in August. Mary Kay 24 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Moving to sectoral bargaining requires changes in law and policy—and worker organizing.

Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, described the bill as “an essential stepping stone to the kind of sectoral bargaining we need.” SEIU and its Fight for $15 and a Union campaign have built support for the bill and have been at the forefront of pushing for sectoral solutions over the last decade. Fast food, with its low wages, rampant labor violations, franchising, and resistance to unionization, is a classic case of an industry in which sectoral

organizing is essential to furthering workers’ interests. Over half a million California workers across more than 30,000 worksites stand to benefit if AB 257 becomes law.

Moving to sectoral bargaining requires changes in law and policy, but more importantly, it requires worker organizing. Its long-term success depends upon strengthening working-class organizations and creating a mass movement with the power to shape political will.

As Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and board chair of Our Revolution, writes: “This cannot be simply a policy argument, but must be a political demand backed up by increasing militancy across sectors.” Mobilization at the local and state level has begun to build this foundation, as workers who have fallen through the cracks are demanding a seat at the table and reimagining what is possible for themselves, their co-workers, their unions, and their country. n

It’s Time for Universal Voting

Requiring every citizen to vote would make our elections more inclusive and our democracy more legitimate.

By E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport We are in the midst of a fierce battle over the fundamental question of who gets to have a say in the decisions that affect all of our lives. The appalling attempt at a coup against our democracy hangs over the discussion, but there is hand-to-hand combat taking place every day on the issue of voting rights. Supporters of full voting rights are fighting defensive battles to protect what we have now, and winning these battles is crucial. But we believe it is time to imagine the democracy we really want to have, to put a larger vision forward of a fully inclusive, fully participatory democracy.

We propose one key element of that vision: universal voting.

In our book, 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting, we propose making voting a requirement for every citizen. The best way to guarantee voting as a right is to assert it, unequivocally, as a civic duty for every American. Enacting universal voting—federally or at the state or municipal levels—would establish a North Star for the democracy movement. It would put every specific battle over voting rights in the context of a fundamental question: Do we want to move toward 100 percent democracy or not?

While universal voting has not been part of the public discussion about voting in this country, it is hardly a new or radical idea. Some two dozen democratic countries around the globe have some form of required voting now—countries as diverse as Australia, Uruguay, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, and Mexico. The new Chilean constitution, pending a popular vote, includes universal voting. And in the case of Australia, it has been in practice, successfully, for almost 100 years, since 1924.

Few ideas have as ample a proof of concept.

Closer to home, we think there is a nearly exact analogy in jury duty. Serving on a jury is a requirement of citizenship that we accept as a matter of course, even if many grumble about being called. Universal jury service ensures that the pool of people called on to decide a person’s guilt or innocence

ref lects our population as a whole. The same should be true for voting. The decisions that affect our lives, and the people we elect to make them, should represent “the sum of us,” as author and advocate Heather McGhee has argued.

So how does this work in Australia? The starting point is a strong, professional, properly funded national agency, the Australian Electoral Commission, whose responsibility is to get everyone on the voting rolls. As of this year, 96.8 percent of Australians were “enrolled,” the combined effort of the Federal Direct Enrolment and Update program, the political parties, and civil society organizations of all stripes. There are many options voters can use to cast ballots, including early voting, mail-in voting, and being able to vote at any polling place in one’s state.

The civic culture is a celebratory one.

Elections are on Saturday, and they fea-

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Universal voting would have several major benefits. There is good reason to believe,

from Australia’s experience, that turnout would shoot up quickly. After what the Australians call “compulsory attendance at the polls” went into effect, turnout increased from less than 60 percent to over 90 percent, and has stayed at that level ever since.

Contrast that to our last two elections, both of which were hailed for their near record-breaking turnouts. In the 2018 midterms, turnout was 50 percent. In the 2020 presidential election, participation was the highest in more than 100 years, at 66.8 percent. This was in fact a real achievement.

Voters took advantage of expanded opportunities to cast a ballot, and they did so despite a pandemic and some 400 lawsuits that made for ever-changing procedures.

But as the experience of Australia shows, we can do much better.

The participation increase universal voting would bring about would also create an electorate more fully reflective of our population. Our current electorate underrepresents young people, communities of color, lower-income voters, and voters less driven by ideology. This in turn undermines government responsiveness to their needs. Numerous studies have shown that government policies, over a long period of time, have skewed toward higher-turnout segments of the electorate—better-off voters and the elderly—as well as the donor class.

There would be other major benefits. If universal voting were enacted, all sectors of our society would bend toward making the system work. Again, as the Australian experience shows, mandating that everyone votes requires making it as easy and con-

Australia’s “democracy sausages” are a fixture of Saturday election days, which frequently get close to 90 percent turnout.

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CAROLA FRENTZEN / PICTURE-ALLIANCE / DPA /AP IMAGES

ture the beloved “democracy sausage” booths at every polling place. People recognize their obligation to participate as a matter of course. In the most recent Australian federal election in May, 89.74 percent of those registered turned out to vote.

Enrolled Australians who do not vote in a federal election receive a letter afterward asking them for a reason, and a broad range of reasons for failing to cast a ballot are accepted. If two notices are served without a response, a fine of AU$20 (about $15 U.S.) is imposed. This system amounts to a nudge, not a shove or a hammer: In the previous election, just 13 percent of nonvoters, or about 1 percent of all potential voters, were assessed the fine.

venient as possible for them to cast ballots.

The reforms democracy advocates are seeking in the U.S. would be the gateway to universal voting. Election administrators—as most among them already do—would have as their primary task enabling citizens to do their duty. Making Election Day a holiday follows naturally from this idea.

Knock-on benefits would likely include a greater emphasis on civic education in high schools; knowing that every graduating student is required to participate would encourage school boards and administrators to give civics a higher priority. There are also strong indications that in Australia and other countries that use this system, citizens who know they are required to vote do in fact educate themselves about the issues at stake, and the candidates and parties in competition.

Universal voting would also dramatically alter the nature of campaigns, for the better. Our current system turns elections into the equivalent of a fancy dinner party.

There is an A-list of consistent voters, a B-list of infrequent voters, and a C-list of those not registered. Campaigns concentrate resources on the A-list. Candidates are usually told by their handlers not to bother talking with people who are not likely to vote, and their campaign messages typically ignore them, too. Under universal voting, campaigns need to talk to everyone. A universal voting system would tell every citizen that they are invited to participate in our experiment in self-government, that their voices and their votes are valued and needed.

That in turn, would change the incentive system for campaigns. Especially in lowerturnout contests, Democratic and Republican consultants alike stress bringing core supporters to the polls, sometimes through angry appeals that might be summarized as “enrage to engage.” Campaigns work to gin up their own bases, and, in all too many cases, to find ways to depress, or even suppress, the votes of their opponents. Under universal voting, parties and candidates will need to make persuasion a much higher priority. They will have to find ways to speak to all voters. Political campaigns will always be passionate and sometimes turn nasty, but universal voting creates strong incentives for more inclusive appeals that could put some guardrails around our toxic polarization.

Universal voting could certainly be

Universal voting could launch an upward cycle of participation and maybe even build trust in our democratic institutions. enacted at the federal level; in fact, the Civic Duty to Vote Act has been filed

by Congressman John Larson (D-CT) in response to the book. Given that the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act couldn’t move, we know this is unlikely to pass anytime soon, but we hope it will help open a broad national debate on what 100 percent democracy could look like.

More promising in the short term are efforts to enact universal voting at the state and local levels. Per the Constitution, states can determine the time, place, and manner of their elections. In states that already have expansive voting policies, universal participation could be the next leap forward.

Indeed, legislators in several states have indicated real interest in advancing legislation in 2023. Bills have already been introduced in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In 13 states, municipalities have broad powers over elections that would allow them to adopt universal voting for local elections.

There’s a snowball effect here: If a large city adopted universal voting, and raised its share of the vote in statewide elections, other cities would be inclined to follow to maintain their influence.

In other states, localities could push state legislatures to grant them this option.

What if they gave a school board election and everybody came? At a time when extreme forces seek to dominate these bodies, many communities would welcome broader participation by voters in electing their members.

The adoption of universal voting would not solve every problem that afflicts American

democracy. It is not a magical elixir. The Electoral College, gerrymandering and redistricting, the outsized influence of big money in our politics, and the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate itself all distort and weaken our democracy, and should be reformed.

But universal voting could be the reform that underwrites other reforms.

It could launch an upward cycle of participation and responsive representation, and maybe even build trust in our democratic institutions.

We have no illusions about the difficulty of making this reality. Our own polling found that only 26 percent of Americans currently support universal voting, although the same polling found that more than half of Americans are open to persuasion. The libertarian reflex against any form of compulsion is a strong current in American culture.

But the case for universal voting has never been made systematically. Our polling also found that 61 percent of Americans agreed with the premise underlying the proposal: that voting is both a right and a duty.

Support for this idea was as strong among Republicans as among Democrats.

There is a powerful democracy movement in the United States that has spearheaded reforms to reduce barriers to voting. Our hope is that this movement will embrace universal voting as a major long-term goal.

Again, the jury duty analogy is instructive. Ending racial discrimination in the selection of juries—which meant including Black Americans among those required to serve—was one of the great victories of the civil rights movement.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the legendary law professor and civil rights lawyer, observed that “A jury gives ordinary people extraordinary power.”

The same is true of the right to vote. n Miles Rapoport is the co-author of 100% Democracy and the Executive Director of 100% Democracy: An Initiative for Universal Voting. He served as Secretary of the State of Connecticut.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author, most recently, of 100% Democracy. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

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How to De-Develop in an Age of Fire and Flood Much is riding on how Americans approach new development and managed retreat as the climate crisis worsens over the next decade.

By Gabrielle Gurley The optimism that greeted the pandemic’s temporary decrease in global emissions has now all but evaporated. Planet Earth is on a trajectory to breach the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius warming frontier at some time in the next five years. Beyond that marker, human and animal life will be in greater peril. The historic rains now flooding the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park, an early wildfire season, and a projected above-average hurricane season all point to the urgent need to drop climate incrementalism for strategies that recast urban and rural built environments in an overheating world.

Radical new perspectives on the climate crisis promise to realign expectations about where humans can live and how they can confront a dizzying array of increasingly severe events: sunny-day f looding, hurricanes, bizarre rain- and snowstorms, and wildfires. Managed retreat—that is, responding to such cataclysms by entire neighborhoods or small towns picking up and moving, by downshifting development in once-desirable areas, by letting other areas return to nature—is clearly a controversial idea today.

But within the next decade, state and local governments will have pointed residents and developers in the direction of survival.

Far from the cacophony of international climate conclaves, some cities and towns are gingerly adapting to the extremes of heat and cold, fire and water. These places are adopting strategies to manage development and recast collective mindsets about what it means to abandon places and lifestyles developed and inculcated over decades.

Ceding neighborhoods (or more) to nature— a course still largely viewed as extreme— will become a regular feature of planning regimes within a decade.

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Managed retreat has simple, if hard-toaccept, goals. One of them is ending haphazard development in areas repeatedly hit by storms. Removing one million homes from the nation’s floodplains could save the country $1 trillion (even though the estimated cost of compensating the homeowners is nearly $200 billion). Residential areas and business districts on gorgeous coastlines or in the middle of forests are often some of the most dangerous and expensive places to build.

Such beauty spots provide property tax

revenues and tourism dollars, which is one reason why municipalities are unwilling to summon the political willpower to say no to well-connected developers, or to settled, inflexible residents who also vote. No one in harm’s way wants to move, since tragedies happen to other people—until their own home floods.

For decades, developers have called the shots in built environments, rebuilding in floodplains or in the seam between inhabited areas and forests because they can. But constant rebuilding in threatened places is

as ill-advised for developers as it is for people who succumb to snatching up a dream house on an eroding barrier beach.

Such developments will end up imposing a tremendous cost on Americans. Managed buyouts will accelerate, and different levels of government will wrangle over which of them should pay. Federal buyout programs are underfunded, notoriously difficult to apply for, and time-consuming to access. A $3.5 billion increase in FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, for example, is disbursed by a formula tied to previous COVID-19 assistance. With the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Army Corps of Engineers also overseeing buyout programs, much deeper coordination (as a Pew Charitable Trusts report proposed) or a wholesale spinout into an independent bureau is the best path forward.

As the federal government reassesses its fiscal and oversight roles, states and localities will foot more of the bills. New Jersey has established Blue Acres, a statewide program to handle damaged and flood-prone properties that focuses, in part, on buying up properties at market rates to return the sites to the wild, recreational, or open space.

This spring, the state announced a $50 million investment (backed by federal Tropical Storm Ida dollars) into the program for communities affected by Ida. To preserve their fiscal bottom lines, municipal officials now beg, plead, and cajole whole neighborhoods (particularly high-end, property-tax-bearing ones) out of floodplains and other high-risk areas. In particularly hard-hit locales, governments may not have to twist many arms: As storms grow in both frequency and intensity, more people will likely be willing to accept buyouts—as most Staten Island residents did in the Oakwood neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy.

The buyout picture is likely to remain especially fraught for many African American communities where homes were undervalued by design, according to A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. In a number of those communities, properties were purposely situated in flood-prone areas that never enjoyed basic residential services and were redlined to keep property values down.

Factor addressing inequities into the buyout calculus.

In Charleston, South Carolina, Dale Morris, the city’s chief resilience officer, believes that Americans need to reassess their relationship with water. The frequent recurrence of what Morris calls “storms of impact” that are more intense and longerlasting has begun to inf luence the city’s decision-making in ways that even a historic storm like Hurricane Hugo in 1989 did not.

Now home to 150,000 people, Charleston suffered extraordinary levels of inundation for several years beginning in 2015, a period that included Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Tropical Storm Irma in 2017.

Today, Charlestonians have a new appreciation of how rain, wind, and bodies of water interact. “People began asking questions like ‘What do we do about this new development that I think is causing flooding downstream? What do we do about larger land use policy, so we don’t make the mistakes that we made 50 years ago because things have changed?’” says Morris, who worked as a senior economist for the Netherlands Embassy for more than two decades and coordinator for Charleston’s Dutch Dialogues, an initiative sponsored in part by the Netherlands that helps local communities assess flooding issues.

With neighborhoods that regularly flood spread across a landmass that features a peninsula and the outflows of three rivers into the Atlantic Ocean, Charleston has taken an aggressive stance on managed retreat. The city has secured FEMA grant money for one neighborhood that already had nearly 50 homes purchased and demolished, and is regulating development in low-lying areas that in the past would be filled for development, such as the 100acre Johns Island tract of land that would have sited 240 homes. Some city councilors were ready to ban fill outright, Morris says, but the city opted instead to regulate fill through stormwater regulations, so that it can be used “judiciously.”

These advances catapulted Charleston into the vanguard of proactive communities—for a reason. “Charleston has been so active because the risk is there, and they feel it,” says Morris.

In the West, the managed-retreat conversation centers on the conundrum of preserving the spaces between human developments and wilderness (known as the “wildland-urban interface”) with buffer zones to protect communities from

wildfires. The Northern California town of Windsor was threatened by the 2019 Kincade Fire, the largest that season, which burned nearly 80,000 acres over 13 days. The fire roared up to the borders of the evacuated town of 27,000, but the firefighting crews managed to save every home.

Near misses, however, do not abate the intense housing development pressures faced by California communities. Windsor has established a growth control ordinance that takes into account that the town has regional housing needs to consider: It steers new development to urbanized areas, essentially avoiding high-risk fire areas and transferring these projects to lowerrisk tracts. Moreover, Windsor’s municipal code underlines the need to “preserve open space land for the continuation of commercial agricultural and productive uses, the protection and use of natural resources, the enjoyment of scenic beauty and recreation, and protection from natural hazards [emphasis added].”

After the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, several heavily damaged towns, including Paradise, decided to rebuild. To that end, the Oregon-based Conservation Biology Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and the Paradise Recreation and Park District jointly studied how wildland riskreduction buffers could also be used as recreation facilities, parkland, or for other outdoor activities, with related revenuegenerating opportunities.

These buffer zones, “which we typically think of as where the built environment comes up against wildland areas and [spaces] managed as natural areas, are also the quintessential representation of the urban-rural divide in American politics” says Jonah Susskind, a research associate at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. But such zones may be able to draw support from both sides of a divide between the climate crisis believers and its skeptics.

Parks and recreation departments are among the few local institutions that have community-wide support, from birding enthusiasts to RV aficionados. That kind of support, Susskind says, could help build consensus on the bigger themes of managing development—and ultimately, planetary survival. “There’s trust in the natural world and interest in preserving the natural world,” he adds. “Both sides get it.” n AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

S T C E P S PRO

It’s Time for Public Pharma Medicare for All would take the profit motive out of insurance; public manufacturing of prescription drugs would take it out of providing care.

By Alexander Sammon Medicare for All was perhaps the best policy litmus test for progressive politicians in the second half of the 2010s. Today, it has rarely looked less likely to become law.

Insurance industry lobbying groups, in tandem with the Chamber of Commerce, have figured out how to beat back the popular policy’s advance, even in one-party blue states like California. And yet the necessity of excising the profit motive from the American health care system, which continues on its ignominious pace to produce bottom-barrel results at maximal prices, has never been clearer.

The COVID-19 pandemic showcased the profound inadequacy of the uniquely privatized and financialized American system, where for-profit (and “nonprofit”) hospitals and for-profit insurance companies teamed up to help the United States secure its worst-in-the-world national death toll while notching one best-ever earnings call after another. Perhaps most egregious of all, pharmaceutical companies like Moderna took public funding for vaccine development, tied up the patents, and converted the greatest public-health crisis and mass death event in 100 years into a 100-year flood of profits. Moderna, which in 2019 posted just $60 million in revenue and didn’t have a product to its name, banked $12.2 billion in profit on $18.5 billion in revenue in 2021; its CEO simultaneously cashed out $400 million in stock during the course of the pandemic.

The vaccine payday was just another manifestation of pharma’s sweet deal in the U.S. Much of the research and development for new discoveries is publicly funded, and yet drugmakers charge whatever they want, with exclusive monopoly patent grants. Not content to just enjoy that bounty, those companies work to extend that monopoly period, through slight changes to the treatment 30 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

TM

(known as “patent evergreening”) or even bribing generic companies to not compete (“pay for delay”). As a result, the median net profit margin for large pharmaceutical companies is almost twice as high as other companies in the S&P 500.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. The federal government can establish its own drug manufacturing apparatus. The path to redeeming our failing public-health sector, and to extricating the profit motive

from health care in the decade to come should go through the establishment of public pharma.

It’s by now commonly known that American drug prices are by far the highest in the world. In 2019, the U.S. spent $1,126 per capita on prescribed medicines; comparable countries spent $552. This is not solely due to exorbitantly priced name-brand pharmaceuticals, which make up just 10 percent of all prescriptions filled. Getting a

generic drug through the patent thicket is so costly that those companies have to bulk up: 40 percent of all generics in 2016 were made by a single manufacturer. That can lead to abuse; a 2019 lawsuit from 44 states alleged a mass generic drug price-fixing ring that increased prices by as much as 1,000 percent.

Insulin, the poster child for the failure of the American pharmaceutical system, which has existed for over 100 years, cost $21 a vial in 1999 and $332 in 2019, a price increase of more than 1,000 percent for a basically unchanged product. That’s to say nothing of the widespread mislabeling and misbranding practices, all of which contribute to a wave of excess deaths. It’s not only the American people being robbed blind. States are similarly price-gouged on everything from naloxone to EpiPens for Medicaid to public schools to police departments, to say nothing of federal programs like Medicare, which have been barred from negotiating any drug prices for nearly 20 years. (A potential reconciliation deal would change that, but only for a handful of treatments.)

Many large drug companies “routinely distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders, generating the extra cash by reducing reserves, selling off assets, taking on debt, or laying off employees,” according to a 2017 paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Fifteen of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies have effectively vacated research and development entirely, spending far more money on advertising than innovation. In fact, major pharma firms spend roughly twice as much on marketing as R&D on average.

What those companies do for Wall Street pales in comparison to what they do for drug discovery, which has been left almost entirely to the public sector already. Federally funded studies contributed to every single one of the 356 drugs approved in the previous decade. The obvious solution, if the public sector is already paying to invent new drugs, is to also manufacture and sell them, providing a powerful springboard for tackling the profit-sickness that ails American health care.

“Public pharmaceutical manufacturing in the U.S. could be a game-changer because it would break the monopoly that pharma has on our medicine supply, and start

A national manufacturer could plug holes in the supply chain where shortages have become commonplace. to shift the balance of power,” said Dana Brown, director of health and economy at the Democracy Collaborative.

An all-in public pharma program could operate on multiple levels, fabricating pharmaceutical products (everything from insulin to IV bags) where private companies currently hold monopoly positions and charge exceptional rates, while also working as a purchaser, importing cheaper drugs from elsewhere and selling them at cost.

The government could also contract with generic producers to run factories, while setting the cost and other parameters. And a federally run program could work in close conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, which is already responsible for the overwhelming majority of the research that goes into creating new drugs and helping to bring them to market, such as with Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

A national manufacturer, too, could plug holes in the supply chain where shortages have become commonplace, or with therapeutics that pharmaceutical companies are disinterested in producing themselves.

This is a not-insignificant part of the sector, including low-margin products like antibiotics, preventive medicine, and vaccines, which are not as remunerative as medicines for treatment of chronic issues.

There’s reason to believe that public pharma might appeal as much to conservatives looking to minimize public spending on social services, like prescription drugs in Medicare, as it does to progressives looking to get the profit motive out of care. Indeed, Utah’s Republican-dominated state legislature has entertained public-purchasing options in the name of fiscal conservatism.

And while a program that appeals to parsimonious conservatives might not seem to

have the ambitious allure of other topline progressive programs, public pharma might be a necessary first step to not just win Medicare for All, but to sustain it and keep it solvent once it’s in place.

“If we got Medicare for All tomorrow, the management of hospitals and provision of care is right now so highly privatized and highly financialized, and so highly controlled by private equity, that it would make you cry,” added Brown. “There’s an extraordinary amount of money going out of provision of care and into financial markets bleeding us dry, to the point that Medicare for All and no other changes would be a really expensive public handout to the private sector in a lot of ways.”

While it would take a level of commitment and money to get such a program off the ground, it’s not as much of a moon shot as one might think. As recently as the 1990s, departments of health in places like Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York City produced things like the diphtheria vaccine, before it was privatized. Other countries, including Brazil, Cuba, Thailand, and South Africa, have public drug manufacturers, evidence that it is hardly cost-prohibitive to create.

Crucially, the groundwork has already been laid in the nation’s biggest state. In 2020, in a bill that came as a surprise to many, California passed SB 852, the California Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which empowered the state legally to create a public label for buying and selling drugs at cost, called CalRx. A second provision, which passed the state Senate in May and awaits passage in the Assembly, would direct millions more from the annual budget toward the production of a generic manufacturing plant in the state.

Meanwhile, Gov. Newsom has pushed state lawmakers to put $100 million into developing CalRx and getting the state’s manufacturing operation off the ground.

Not surprisingly, the program is beginning with insulin, as roughly four million state residents suffer from diabetes, a quarter of whom cannot afford the insulin they rely on. Not for nothing, the California program is also backed by the highly organized diabetes rights groups in the state.

The details of California’s program remain under negotiation and will have to be watched closely. But the considerAUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

S T C E P S PRO able amount of resources already allocated not only to developing a public label for selling drugs at cost but to establishing FDA-approved facilities capable of producing those products themselves has drawn major public attention from neighboring states. Not long after California passed its initial legislation, Washington state followed with a bill of its own that created an even broader authority. A regional consortium of Western states, including Washington as well as Oregon and Nevada, have begun talking about arrangements on public bulk purchasing.

A public pharmaceutical manufacturer would not only upend the regime of high prices, it could have huge knock-on positive effects for the biosciences industry. Most drugs are currently produced overseas, but new public plants could offer the sort of well-paying manufacturing jobs that the political class loves to celebrate but seems incapable of reproducing. “I think that doing the actual production in the public sector is an industrial strategy for the country,” said Brown.

It could even change the nature of whitecollar lab-coat work, she added. “[It’s] good for scientists who are in it for the science and not just patent chasers, who would no longer have to work at big pharma firms. Working in public pharmaceutical research could be much more equitable, with something more like tenure jobs.”

It might be unrealistic for the government to manufacture every single drug. But the for-profit industry would have to consider the risk of the public sector forcing their golden-goose products to face public competition if they set prices too high.

That threat alone could moderate prices all across the industry.

For example, it’s unlikely Aduhelm maker Biogen would have initially priced its Alzheimer’s medication at $56,000, in 32 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

California’s public drug manufacturing initiative will begin by producing insulin, the price of which has increased more than tenfold since 1999.

a move that threatened to singlehandedly bankrupt Medicare, if it knew that came with the risk of a public manufacturer creating a generic version of its multiple sclerosis medication Tecfidera, which accounted for more than a third of the company’s revenue in 2020. (Medicare ultimately decided not to cover the drug widely; Biogen cut the price tag after public outcry—to $28,200.)

At least since Nancy Pelosi first grasped the Speaker’s gavel in 2007, Democrats have pledged to be committed to regulating the sky-high cost of prescription drugs, and on the verge of passing reform legislation. Unsurprisingly, such an overhaul polls extremely favorably among Democrats and Republicans alike. But even if something finally passes this year, it won’t go far enough to truly reverse the misaligned incentives of the business model.

The most popular refrain from progressives regarding drug prices during the most successful moments of the Medicare for All push has looked to points north, like bulk

importation from Canada, where drug prices are notably lower. But that solution is hardly durable, and given the era-defining fragility in supply chains, relying on imports is not a long-term solution that can be trusted in moments of crisis. Making needed medications at home is an enduring reform.

California has provided proof of concept for ambitious national programs in the past, setting in motion things like tailpipe emission regulations. Given the state’s size and economic might, a successful foray into public pharma could facilitate the embrace of a program at a national level. Already, a bill has been stranded in Congress since 2018, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced legislation with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) for an Office of Drug Manufacturing within the Department of Health and Human Services. With the tailwind of burgeoning programs at the state level, a public pharmaceutical build-out could be the beginning of a liberalism that actually builds, and a consequential first step toward health decommodification. n

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34 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Mars, Inc., is best known for making chocolate bars. But it also owns the most pet hospitals in the U.S., and workers say the conditions are toxic.

“Welcome to Hell” Vanessa Gutierrez of Pas-

saic, New Jersey, loved all animals, but maybe horses the most. She nurtured that love through several summers working as a counselor at a horseback riding camp.

With her social media posts dotted with hashtags like #SavingAnimalsOneAtATime and #AgirlsBestFriendWillAlwaysBeHerHorse, she was destined to move into animal care.

Gutierrez loved to prepare the welcoming boards in the hospital rooms, adding the names of the pets who would be seen on a given day. But during her three years at VCA Veterinary Specialists of Connecticut, the tone of her posts took a noticeable shift.

It might have been the pandemic, which thrust immense pressure upon every veterinary worker in the country. The lockdown led many families to fill their lives with pets, increasing the need for health services without adequate resources at pet hospitals to meet the increased demand.

But Gutierrez’s bouts of anxiety and depression seemed to go beyond pandemic-induced stress. In June 2021, she walked away from VCA Specialists of Connecticut, describing the company as “the most toxic place I have ever worked & I feel so much better now that I’m out of there!”

That improved mental state did not hold. On October 27, 2021, Gutierrez died by suicide.

A story she told a month earlier on her public Facebook page may offer some clues as to why. While still working at VCA, Gutierrez went missing from her family for days and was eventually hospitalized for suicidal ideation. When she returned to her job, she found a disciplinary “No call/No show” write-up from her manager, for missing work.

Despite Gutierrez insisting she gave her manager a doctor’s note and that she was listed on the FBI’s missing persons list, VCA still asked for more information about the absence. Gutierrez said that security camera footage would show her physically handing the note to the manager, but the manager claimed to have never received it.

As a last resort, the company told Gutierrez that, regardless of her condition, she was in the wrong for not notifying the company that she would not be at work.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t think to stop in the middle of my suicide attempt to call and let Management know that I would not be making it in for my shift,” she wrote.

In her post, Gutierrez said she emailed VCA president Todd Lavender on several occasions to report her concerns. Instead of responding to her, Gutierrez alleged that Lavender forwarded everything to VCA’s HR vice president Maria Druse, who was one of the people Gutierrez named in her messages. “That showed me that either you didn’t even bother to read my emails or you just didn’t care,” she wrote, weeks before her death.

BY JAROD FACUNDO AND BRIAN OSGOOD ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY BEDROSIAN AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

Photos from Vanessa Gutierrez’s public Facebook page. She died by suicide last October.

Six days after her death, Gutierrez’s Facebook page was updated with an invitation to join a private group for current and former VCA employees called VCA Employees for Vanessa, to “demand justice for her within the company.” The group, later renamed Justice for Vanessa, currently has 303 members.

The Prospect learned about Vanessa’s story through veterinary professionals who were in close contact with the Gutierrez family following her death. They and the Prospect attempted to reach out to the Gutierrez family for an interview. The family did not respond.

The source of suicidal thoughts can be difficult to decisively pinpoint; it’s never the result of a single event.

But according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 90 percent of suicide victims had a diagnosable mental-health condition at the time of their death.

In other words, with the proper resources and support networks in place, suicide is preventable.

One common factor in many suicides is stress. And to be sure, veterinary medicine is a pressure-cooker profession, requiring a high tolerance for graphic trauma, just like the human medical field. “I’ve seen extraordinary, unimaginable [animal] suffering,” one veterinary worker who requested anonymity said. “We see what first responders see.” And because many employees on the front lines have a deep connection to animals, having to deal with that suffering day after day can weigh heavily.

The costs of such conditions are borne largely by the newest entries into the profession. According to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median age for veterinary assistants and technicians is 26.7 and 31.8 years old, respectively. Women make up 84 percent of all veterinary assistants and 82 percent of all technicians.

However, while the trauma of pet care looms large in the lives of the young women who experience it, interviews with veterinary professionals identified the parent company of VCA, Mars, Inc., as the greater source of

36 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

their anguish. Ten employees who worked at Mars facilities across the country, many speaking anonymously due to concerns over retaliation, described how issues like understaffing and tensions between workers and management made a physically and emotionally taxing job increasingly untenable. Furthering this bitterness is the feeling among many workers that their love for animals has been exploited to push them to accept unbearable working conditions, often at the expense of their mental health.

Several workers said that conditions in their workplaces became so bad that they considered taking their own life. When they expressed to management that they had been experiencing suicidal ideation, these workers stated that their mental-health concerns were treated dismissively. They found in Mars not an ally but a source of excessive strain.

That tracks with the social media traces Gutierrez left about her job with VCA. She relentlessly described an exhausting and toxic work environment, exacerbated by an uncaring, hostile corporate culture that imposed severe psychological distress, even after she left the company.

A 2019 study on the veterinary profession reported that male and female veterinary technicians died by suicide at a rate that was 5.0 and 2.3 times greater, respectively, than the general population.

Several posts in online Reddit communities such as r/VetTech also describe struggles of mental health and toxic work conditions across the profession. And technicians and assistants share stories about working conditions in private Facebook groups. Liz Hughston, a licensed veterinary technician and president of the National Veterinary Professionals Union, who has served as an administrator for several private groups, told the Prospect that “based on the countless experiences relayed to me by their employees and our members, Mars appears to be focused solely on profits … workers are mired in cynicism and helplessness.”

In a statement, a Mars Veterinary Health spokesperson said, “We are committed to taking a holistic approach to supporting our Associates’ wellbeing—particularly combatting systemic mental health challenges faced by veterinary professionals—and fostering a culture of safety to help ensure a future where people and pets are thriving.” The spokesperson said that “out of respect for privacy,” they would not comment on Gutierrez or other current or former employees named in this story.

The allegations contrast with the stated intentions of Mars, Inc., a privately owned company typically known for candy brands such as M&M’s and Snickers that is also the largest employer of veterinary professionals in the United States, with over 100,000 employees worldwide. Mars Petcare reported $18 billion in revenue in 2020, according to Statista. In June, Mars, Inc., made Poul Weihrauch, the head of its global pet care business, the new CEO. The move into veterinary care came out of Mars’s

business in pet food, and it was furthered through a series of rollups of other pet care chains. A 2017 purchase of VCA for an estimated $9.1 billion was among a flurry of veterinary acquisitions over a 15-year period.

In July 2021, a month after Vanessa Gutierrez left the company, Mars Veterinary Health North America announced a $500 million “multi-year investment” in employee mental health, to promote “thriving careers, workforce diversity, and sustainable change across the veterinary profession.” In a press release citing “the evolving needs” of the profession, the company’s president, Doug Drew, said that after “considering feedback from more than 10,000 Associates, we are investing in programs that further enhance their health and well-being.”

But the testimony of Mars’s own workers paints a less sympathetic picture.

In 2014, Morgan VanFleet joined Seattle Veterinary Specialists’ facility in Kirkland, Washington. When she began there, SVS was an independent practice. “Veterinary medicine used to be a trusted profession,” she said.

“When I started there were few corporate practices.”

But shortly after she started, SVS was purchased by BluePearl, a veterinary conglomerate. And on October 9, 2015, BluePearl executives announced to their employees that they would be joining Mars Petcare.

The merger was touted as providing “unprecedented opportunities for growth and support.”

Over the course of her employment with BluePearl, VanFleet worked at four of its locations in the Seattle area: Kirkland, downtown Seattle, North Seattle, and Renton. But after the Mars deal, day-to-day life on the job worsened.

VanFleet was an emergency room/intensive care unit supervisor at the Kirkland facility, though she reported to two other managers. Despite most facilities scheduling workers for 8-to-12-hour shifts, VanFleet said she normally worked 14 or 15 hours. She said that in one instance she worked a 21-hour shift; understaffing made it impossible for her to leave.

The stress was psychologically reinforced by comments from management, according to VanFleet. She was once told by a supervisor, “You’re never going to make what a nurse makes.” Indeed, average wages for vet assistants and techs are $29,780 and $36,850, respectively, even though they could have supervisory duties and high-pressure responsibilities. A study published in 2019 found that median wages of assistants and technicians did not keep up with the cost of living, even in metropolitan areas where pay for veterinary assistants and technicians was highest.

Though such long shifts could potentially violate wage and hour laws, according to Hughston, state veterinary medical boards are more concerned with adequate licensing or investigating cases of fraud and theft than labor standards. Additionally, the medical boards generally do not mandate patient-to-provider

ratios at vet facilities, something that could help prevent understaffing.

In 2014, before the Mars acquisition, VanFleet said she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that causes permanent damage to the nervous system. The next year, she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder, which she cannot confirm is directly related. Instead of being able to make the 30-minute commute to the Kirkland facility, VanFleet was told she could no longer drive so long as she had seizures regularly occurring. The bus to Kirkland and back home took two hours. Eventually, she applied for a transfer to BluePearl’s facility in Renton.

According to VanFleet, she was given the impression in the interview process that she would be able to leave work when her shift ended. Instead, the same understaffing issues led to her again staying for hours.

Management chalked up the uncertainty to unforeseen emergency surgeries, but VanFleet insisted that such emergencies, like at any hospital, were common and should have been factored into staff head counts.

The transfer to Renton did not improve VanFleet’s mental state either. She was written up for leaving on time, when her shift technically ended. When she notified a surgeon about an uneven caseload that would cause her to stay more hours than she was scheduled, VanFleet walked away, and the surgeon followed her into a utility room. As the surgeon questioned her about why she was mad in the first place, VanFleet experienced a panic attack. She said, “That evening I nearly completed suicide.”

In a separate shift, while she was at a computer finishing a case and beginning the next one, she experienced shaking symptoms that meant a seizure was soon to come. Her last memory was falling out of her chair, hitting her head on a dog kennel to the right side of her, until EMTs arrived on scene and evacuated her from the facility.

Following the seizure incident, she communicated to management that she needed time to recover, but when they stopped responding to VanFleet’s emails and phone calls, she realized she no longer had a job. “I was fired for having a seizure disorder,” VanFleet alleged.

M

Male and female veterinary technicians died by suicide at a rate that was 5.0 and 2.3 times greater, respectively, than the general population.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

Mars purchased the VCA chain for $9.1 billion, part of a flurry of veterinary acquisitions.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the exact cause of multiple sclerosis is unknown. But VanFleet alleged that, after leaving BluePearl and obtaining a few months of medical treatment, her symptoms slowed and her seizure disorder stabilized. She can now drive herself freely.

VanFleet blames Mars for her physical condition worsening. “Your health deteriorates because you’re so mentally ill,” she said, explaining that she’s seen in others the physical manifestations of the psychological stress while working for Mars, Inc.: chronic fatigue, weight gain, depression, anxiety, self-harm, and substance use disorders.

Asked about BluePearl, VanFleet was blunt: “I never want to go back.”

Lindsay Smith started working at a Veterinary Specialty Hospital of the Carolinas in 2017. A year earlier, Mars had purchased the North Carolina facility. Smith initially thought she had found a workplace where she’d be treated like a valued member of a “little family,” committed to a goal that unites many veterinary care workers: a passion for helping animals and their owners. She said that the facility didn’t feel overly corporate and operated with a degree of autonomy.

But in late 2019, through corporate restructuring, the facility was designated as a BluePearl specialty and emergency medicine facility. The little family started to change. Current and former Mars employees who spoke to the Prospect said that, after a corporate takeover, pay was often cut, qualified workers with years of experience were classified as low-skilled, and staffing was not adequate to handle the workload.

“I would work 17, 18-hour shifts due to lack of staffing and because I had a 200-mile round-trip commute, I would stay at the clinic a lot. They had a room the over38 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

night doctor could sleep in,” Smith told the Prospect. “I regularly got told that this was not acceptable and that if I made the decision to stay late and to not go home that I would have to get a hotel room. I really felt like management was deflecting back onto me instead of accepting the fact that they did not have enough staff to handle the workload and they were burning out everyone on the floor.”

Once, while handling a large dog, Smith’s head was knocked against a kennel, and she suffered a concussion so severe that she says she struggled to remember the names of her own children. Smith claimed that BluePearl’s insurance provider initially refused to cover the medical expenses from the injury, leading to several heated phone calls.

Incidents similar to Smith’s are a common feature of veterinary work. Another technician at a Mars facility who requested anonymity told the Prospect, “My hands are currently covered in scratches. I’ve had teeth come very close to my throat.” While working at an emergency facility in Maryland, the technician described a separate incident where a German shepherd bit her colleague’s abdomen, almost killing them.

Following Smith’s head injury, she said she had to wait almost three hours for a shift replacement to arrive before she was allowed to drive herself to the hospital, and then a substantial commute back to her home.

In the weeks of recovery that followed, management reached out on several occasions, not to ask if she was feeling better, but to insist that the facility was short-staffed and she was needed back at work. “I gave that place so much of my blood, sweat, and tears,” said Smith. “And they don’t even ask if I’m all right?”

The feelings of disposability, neglect, and exploitation that VanFleet and Smith experienced were common

features at Mars’s facilities, according to workers who spoke to the Prospect. As one veterinary technician who requested anonymity put it, even the most dedicated professional cannot compensate for an understaffed facility. The technician explained that six patients per technician used to be the maximum allowable number.

Today, technicians often oversee 18 patients at once.

“You end up deceiving clients,” the technician said.

For example, an animal’s vitals need to be checked every hour. At the quickest, one could check vitals in six minutes, but if the patient is on medications or an emergency arises, the process takes longer. This becomes mathematically impossible with 18 patients to monitor.

According to Good Jobs First, which maintains a database of corporate regulatory violations, in 2018 BluePearl received a $20,000 penalty for workplace safety violations for a facility in Tacoma, Washington.

In 2021, a VCA in Fairfax, Virginia, received a penalty of $5,163 for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. However, Hughston explained that public documents likely do not reflect the scope of occupational health and safety violations at Mars-owned facilities, because many workers likely do not have the resources or knowledge to file complaints.

Due to the understaffing, when a patient dies, it falls on the same workers who treated the patient to break the news to clients. Because of the intense emotions of telling a client their pet just died, it’s extremely difficult to discuss the financial arrangements, knowing that right after you need to treat your next patient.

At the end of every day, the technician and her coworkers asked themselves, “How many patients did we lose?” She continued, “I would cry driving home from work, sleep for five hours, then cry on my drive to work.

You just sit in your car, cry for a bit.” Then she would be greeted during a shift change with lines like “Thank God, you’re here. Welcome to hell.”

Employees said that Mars would attempt to fill understaffing gaps with interns, who are typically either future professionals in training or veterinary medical students completing a yearlong residency. According to the Veterinary Information Network, an online community that provides resources for veterinarians, internships are not regulated by any organizational body, with no set workplace rules, hours, or minimum salaries. Mars employees said interns often worked as many as 18 hours each day.

The technician told the Prospect that a former intern they worked with at a BluePearl facility died by suicide months after their internship ended. Even though the intern’s death took place after leaving BluePearl, she felt like the company bore a measure of responsibility for her and her co-workers’ well-being because they worked so closely with the intern for months. “People are dying for this field. Something needs to change. I can’t bear the weight of losing another friend.”

Another worker who requested anonymity described

a night shift where she was left alone for four hours.

During that time, 12 emergency cases came in, half of which ultimately required euthanasia. Toward the end of her employment at BluePearl, she experienced what she called a “full-blown psychotic episode” and was hospitalized for five days for suicidal ideation. Afterward, management pulled her into their offices for questioning. “My doctor’s note should’ve been enough,” she said.

She described an environment where people would joke about how they’d rather be dead than show up for work. On her private Facebook page, she wrote a post disclosing her struggles with mental health. Someone on staff must have shared it with her managers, because management reached out to her. She said she was lectured about the importance of the company’s public image and why she shouldn’t post about her mental health.

The Prospect requested documentation of the incident, but the worker said that it’s common for such incidents to be resolved through “private conversations.”

The worker alleged that this tactic prevents the creation of a paper trail.

Following the mental-health episode, the woman’s psychiatrist told her it was unsafe for her to re-enter the field. She now collects disability payments for mental and physical health reasons. “Every time someone kills themselves,” she said as we wrapped up our phone call, “we all hear, that could’ve been me.”

According to VanFleet, the company has for years told workers that their mental and physical exhaustion is “compassion fatigue,” something separate from burnout that relates to “the psychological cost of healing others.”

While compassion fatigue may be recognized by the American Psychological Association, Mars frames compassion fatigue as a personal failing, VanFleet claimed, further weighing on her and her colleagues’ psychological stability. “I have been gaslit so much I believe I am the problem,” she said.

To VanFleet, a more accurate term for her and her coworkers’ experiences would be moral distress, given the difficult position of having to balance genuine care for patients with corporate revenue. In one incident, VanFleet elected to provide pain medication to a cat for free.

Afterward, she was written up for not refusing treatment because the client couldn’t afford the procedure.

“It’s gutting not being able to work by your values

W

Workers said that feelings of disposability, neglect, and exploitation were common features at Mars’s facilities.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

For some workers, the full scope of the toxicity they experienced at Mars did not set in until they had found new jobs elsewhere. and why you entered the profession in the first place,” VanFleet said. “If you exhibited human weaknesses, you could lose your job.”

A recent Facebook post by a former employee, Brandy Warnick, who worked at a facility acquired by VCA in 2019, speaks to this toxicity as well. For months, staff at the facility implored HR to do something about a doctor who had been brought on in July 2020 to help with staffing shortages. The doctor quickly earned a reputation for her callous treatment of both animals and fellow staff, once picking up a dog by the neck, lifting it off the ground, and screaming in its face in front of a customer. “[HR] consistently blew us off,” Warnick told the Prospect. “At a staff meeting I asked, ‘Is our mental health less important than hers?’”

In April 2022, Warnick drafted an email to the regional HR manager detailing her and her co-workers’ concerns, along with information about the doctor’s previous tenure, where she was allegedly at risk of losing her license over claims of animal abuse. VCA finally took action, but not against the doctor. Warnick was told to leave the facility, and says that VCA called the local police department to ensure that she left quietly.

“I have absolutely no idea why I lost my job … other than I wouldn’t support an abusive Dr and watch my staff be abused,” Warnick stated in the Facebook post. “This company is choosing profit over the mental health, well-being and fair labor for every staff member at that hospital.”

Many workers stated that the company is aware of mental-health issues among its workforce. But early solutions amounted to little more than personal self-care tips, VanFleet said. For example, management encouraged workers to consider journaling, doing yoga, and meditating.

More recently, the company has implemented programs specifically to address mental health. In a video on Mars’s website, a veterinarian says that a two-day mental-health and first-aid training sponsored by the company gave her the tools she needed to support veterinary staff. “I genuinely feel that the training that I was given, and the support that I was able to give, helped [veterinary professionals] get better and back to work.”

The Mars spokesperson told the Prospect, “A support strategy needs to be multi-faceted, and we are on a multi-year journey to invest in and build layers of support.”

In 2019, Banfield, another Mars-owned chain, announced ASK (Assess, Support, Know), a “first-of40 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

its-kind program” for suicide prevention. The two-hour training sessions, in partnership with VetFolio, a resource portal founded by the nonprofit North American Veterinary Community, were given in person to 19,000 employees a year later. The training is now available online.

A social worker featured in the training tells viewers, “You don’t have to be a mental-health professional to provide meaningful support to people in mental distress.

All you need is the confidence and willingness to ASK.” The training session advises participants to assess their colleague’s potential mental-health episode by asking open-ended questions. Next, they are counseled to offer support through “active listening and empathetic statements,” and get to know what resources and professional help is available, including suicide prevention hotlines, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the veterinary professionals support organization Not One More Vet. The recommendations amount to asking vet staff to be conscientious. “ASK is not intended to be counseling or treatment,” the narrator states. “It is intended to offer hope through empathy, caring, connection, and by referring them to professional help.”

At the end of the training, the social worker tells viewers to consider using paid time off, to take breaks throughout the day, and to express gratitude with their fellow colleagues. Suggested activities to “recharge the mind” include journaling, mindful breathing, stretching and meditation exercises, and a short mind-wander walk. These are the same self-care tips that were part of Mars’s earlier efforts.

Hidden within ASK’s terms and conditions, VetFolio states that they and their business partners will not be liable for any damages sustained from using their services. In addition, there is a forced arbitration clause, blocking workers or their families from participating in a class action lawsuit against VetFolio.

Starting earlier this year, BluePearl and VCA associates could get treatment through the telehealth provider Lyra Health for up to 12 free sessions per year. Lyra Health asserts that 76 percent of VCA associates who used their services reported seeing improvements. But Hughston explained that there’s a strong stigma against speaking up about one’s mental health, because so many workers have been retaliated against or know of others who have. “Why would they sign up when they know what’s going to happen to them?”

Earlier this year, a former Lyra therapist named Megha Reddy told BuzzFeed that the company’s “productivity-based” bonus structure incentivizes therapists to churn patients out. Reddy was expected, as a parttime therapist, to have a new slate of patients every six to ten weeks. And with a cap of 12 free sessions per year, the discretion therapists would normally possess to decide if a patient no longer needs treatment is out of their control.

Patients are periodically sent “outcomes surveys,” and Lyra Health claims the data collected will be confiden-

tial, anonymized, and aggregated. Yet, buried within its HIPAA notice page, Lyra states, “We can use and share your [protected health information] to support our business operations.” Lyra Health’s terms of use also include a forced arbitration clause. For many of those who spoke to the Prospect, programs such as Lyra Health are just a way for the company to check off a box and say that it cares about its workers’ mental well-being.

In recent weeks, Mars has announced a new mentalhealth program for BluePearl facilities called “Dare to Self-Care,” which repackages the same tips that it promoted during VanFleet’s tenure and the ASK era. The Prospect obtained documents from the new program, which included suggesting to employees that they set boundaries between themselves and the animals they care for. The new program acknowledges that while there are limitations to self-care strategies, employees should still consider activities like exercising, eating well, spending time with friends, and taking vacations as a way to manage their “caregiving burnout.”

A veterinary professional from the West Coast who requested anonymity said that, while the new program is helpful in the individual sense, they still felt that the proliferation of self-care strategies bypasses how Mars, Inc., contributes to such emotional distress.

If Mars admitted that its working conditions are impossible, it would be an acknowledgment of its role in fostering a stressful and often desperate environment. Workers suggested that Mars could maintain proper staffing of not just technicians and assistants, but of dedicated social workers for clients and employees. (The Mars spokesperson said they are expanding their network of in-house social workers.) In addition, its mental-health treatment could better match what workers endure.

But this is not how those who have worked with Mars characterize the company. “It’s set up for maximum profit,” one worker told the Prospect. “There’s no concern about how quickly they’re burning people out.”

One way to ensure proper staffing and ensure worker concerns are heard is through unionization. But those initiatives in the veterinary industry have struggled.

Some grassroots organizing has begun on social media, with workers connecting and sharing their stories and finding commonalities in their experiences. But after a successful organizing drive in early 2018 at a VCA clinic in San Francisco that received help from the local longshoremen’s union, VCA resisted bargaining on the initial contract, earning an August 2019 complaint from the National Labor Relations Board. A year later, VCA shut the facility down, stif ling the union effort.

In May 2018, workers at a BluePearl facility in North Seattle voted 46 to 4 to join the National Veterinary Professionals Union. Among its first organizers was Morgan VanFleet, spurred by how BluePearl fired her after her seizure incident. But in June 2021, BluePearl announced they would be shutting down emergency

services at the hospital. The North Seattle facility is now permanently closed.

Hughston told the Prospect that before the North Seattle closure, approximately 60 to 75 percent of the bargaining unit had left because improved benefits were offered at other nearby facilities. “Mars hammered the [North Seattle] practice relentlessly and bargained at the edge of legality.”

An additional hardship for organizing is that industry working conditions lead to high turnover rates.

According to the American Veterinary Medical Foundation, as of 2016, most practices averaged 30 to 50 percent turnover, and given today’s tighter labor markets those numbers may have increased.

As the world’s largest practice owner, the way Mars treats its employees and clients shapes industry standards. Pablo Ruiz authored a 2019 study on corporate consolidation in veterinary medicine that specifically examined Mars Petcare’s outsized influence. Ruiz told the Prospect, “Large group, corporate-owned veterinary practices should be able to provide better working conditions and wages to their support staff, but this hasn’t happened to this day.”

For some of the workers, the full scope of the toxicity they experienced while working for Mars did not set in until they had found new jobs elsewhere. “I had become so stressed, so much less patient with others, when I was working there,” said one worker. “After leaving BluePearl, I was able to get off of my anxiety medication. I started having fun in my life again, started waking up happy and excited to see my kids.”

Many of the workers who spoke to the Prospect characterized Vanessa Gutierrez’s suicide as an entirely avoidable tragedy that epitomized everything wrong with the current state of veterinary medicine.

One veterinary technician who requested anonymity said that half the deaths by suicide she knows of in her life were by other veterinary professionals. The technician said, mournfully, “It’s paralyzing hearing about the suicidal ideation among your co-workers.” n

A slide from an ASK (Assess, Support, Know) training, which a Mars affiliate established in 2019.

Brian Osgood is a reporter for Al Jazeera English based in California.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

THE MODERN-DAY COMPANY TOWNS OF ARKANSAS

Fortune 100 giants Tyson Foods and Walmart have heavy influence over two cities within 20 miles of one another, tucked into the northwest corner of the state.

By Olivia Paschal 42 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

n a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas’s Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council. The first Black woman ever to run for office in Springdale, Gachuzo-Colin wants to move from what she calls “old Springdale”—long dominated by white bankers, farmers, and businessmen—to “new Springdale,” a place more representative of the town’s current demographics and culture.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

“Old Springdale was very much a good old boy town. Old Springdale had no sense of culture, no sense of wanting to move forward, no desire to move forward,” she told me. Old Springdale—like most of Springdale’s current city council, which is all white except one member—is more likely to be found at Rodeo of the Ozarks than at the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, which Gachuzo-Colin founded, or at any event celebrating the large immigrant communities who make up most of the workers in the city’s poultry processing plants, she said.

Springdale is the heart of Arkansas’s poultry industry, and a center of the nation’s meat industry. Tyson Foods, the secondlargest meatpacker in the world and the country’s largest poultry producer, was founded and headquartered here. Tyson is the largest employer in Springdale and the third-largest in the state.

Tyson and the rest of the poultry industry have shaped Springdale’s economy and population, as well as the rural economy in the surrounding hills, over the last eight decades. Feed mills and processing plants line the highway; workers cluster in neighborhoods near the plants. The names of the poultry industry’s local entrepreneurs— Tyson, George, Parsons, and more—are attached to streets, parks, and facilities around the city, from John Tyson Elementary to Parsons Stadium, where the rodeo is held. Springdale is an industry town through and through.

One reason the poultry industry’s monopolization of Springdale flies under the radar as much as it does is because of another, flashier “company town” less than half an hour north. Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to the corporate headquarters of Walmart, and to several members of the company’s founding family, one of the richest families in the world.

In recent years, several of the Waltons, their family foundation, the local regional economic development council, and a web of interconnected investment and real estate firms have exerted massive amounts of influence over the northwest Arkansas region, which in addition to Springdale and Bentonville includes the cities of Rogers and Fayetteville, home to the state’s flagship university.

“Each city is owned by a company. Springdale is Tyson, Bentonville is Walmart,” said Rumba Yambú, the founder of the organization inTRANSitive, which advocates for 44 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

the rights of trans immigrants in the state.

“Because they have such power, it’s been easy for folks to subscribe to or obey the rules that they have unwittingly put out for northwest Arkansas.”

Yambú, now in Little Rock, immigrated to Springdale from El Salvador with their mother, who, like other immigrants, came to work in the poultry industry.

Walmart and Tyson—two of the world’s largest companies—play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs. In fact, northwest Arkansas could be considered a critical locus of what some refer to as “neoliberalism”—the marketization and privatization of governing, championed in part by President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during Tyson and Walmart’s surge to power and friendly with both companies and families. (Hillary Clinton sat for six years on Walmart’s board of directors.) Neither is a “company town” in the traditional mining or cotton mill sense. But with weak local governments and a severe lack of alternative capital, they’re company towns for the public-private age, that can live and die on markets far beyond their control.

The success of Tyson and Walmart resulted in a windfall for many people in northwest Arkansas, most notably in the form of stock options, corporate jobs, and the ability to remain on otherwise unprofitable farmland. The companies provided jobs, and the families’ philanthropic arms provided funds for infrastructure, development, and education.

But the flip side is apparent in the region, too: workers stuck in cycles of poverty because of the companies’ low pay and lack of benefits, a culture of silence around criticisms or dissatisfaction with the corporations because of how much power they wield, the emptying out and pricing up of the rural hinterlands in service of regional urbanization driven by corporate investment. The infrastructure and development initiatives cater largely to upper-middleclass lifestyles, not to those working in factories, in warehouses, or on the retail floor. These contradictions are fundamental to company towns—amenities on the one hand, exploitation and undemocratic institutions on the other.

“Northwest Arkansas is our home and by investing in our own backyard and recognizing the potential of our people, we’ve helped elevate the region to a global stage

Walmart and Tyson play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs. and built a place we’re proud to call home,” Tyson said in a statement provided to the Prospect. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.

The northwest Arkansas metro region is tiny by almost any measure—the 131stlargest metropolitan statistical region in the country with just over half a million residents. The largest city, Fayetteville, has a population of 95,230 as of the most recent census. Arkansas is one of the poorest states in one of the poorest regions in the country, and until the 1970s northwest Arkansas was one of the poorest parts of the state.

Walmar t was founded in Bentonville in 1962; today, the city plays host to Walmart’s corporate headquarters, a slew of schools, art museums, and public parks, and hundreds if not thousands of offices of Walmart suppliers. Its residents are largely white-collar businesspeople; the median income is over $80,000 and the poverty rate just 7.6 percent. The city is over 70 percent white.

Tyson was initially founded as a chickenhauling company in Springdale in 1935; it eventually expanded into the other areas of the poultry industry and by the 1960s was a vertically integrated production company. Located about 20 miles down the highway from Bentonville, Springdale is home to Tyson’s corporate headquarters and two of its flagship processing plants (several other poultry producers, including George’s, another local company, and Cargill also operate plants in the city). The city’s median income is $50,343, and it has a poverty rate of 17.6 percent.

When large-scale poultry farming came on the scene in the 1940s, many farmers viewed it as a lifeline for the regional economy, allowing generations of Arkansans to stay on their land rather than moving to cities. Walmart also catered to the type of small towns that dot northwest

APRIL L. BROWN / AP PHOTO

Tyson runs processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries, and contracts with poultry growers in the northwest Arkansas region.

Arkansas. Its first store opened in Rogers in 1962, with others opening across the rural South soon after.

The incalculable wealth of these two companies and their founding families has been extracted from other places, including their own rural hinterlands. It’s been well documented how the arrival of a Walmart impacts small businesses and the local economy in a given town, lowering wages and driving competitors out of business. The company also takes advantage of federal and state tax breaks, grants, and abatements, receiving at least $241,531,675 in overall subsidies, several million of that in Arkansas, according to Good Jobs First.

Tyson’s business model, especially in rural markets where it can exert near-monopsony control over chicken farmers, is similarly exploitative: The company traps chicken farmers in contracts over which they have very little say, a practice for which it has come under scrutiny for years. The work-

ing conditions in its processing plants are notoriously poor, and workers notoriously underpaid and overworked, a condition that came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic when the company worked directly with the Trump administration to draft the executive order used as justification to keep meatpacking plants open even as workers inside were infected and died. Managers at one Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, notoriously bet on how many of their workers would get infected with COVID, according to a November 2020 lawsuit. Hundreds of workers in Tyson’s Springdale plants contracted COVID, yet they remained open.

Tyson has received roughly $63,948,020 in subsidies from the state and localities in Arkansas, per Good Jobs First.

While Bentonville is mostly white and relatively wealthy, Springdale is segregated, with higher-income white residents living in different neighborhoods and attending different schools than the working-class

immigrants who provide labor for the city’s poultry plants. The Har-Ber Meadows neighborhood was founded in 1990 as a New Urbanist community, and census tracts in the vicinity of Har-Ber High School are more than 85 percent white in a town that’s one of the most diverse in the state.

Meanwhile, the area around Springdale High School, on the east side of town, is majority-Hispanic.

Most of the Latino immigrants working at Tyson plants come from Mexico or El Salvador. A substantial population also hails from the Marshall Islands. Due to radioactive contamination from when the United States conducted dozens of nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshallese people have the ability to live and work in the United States without visas, and many have come to Springdale.

According to the most recently available census data, over 70 percent of the more than 14,200 noncitizen immigrants in Springdale AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

make less than $35,000 a year. Immigrant workers at Tyson’s plants made as little as $12.50 an hour until a recent boost to a $15.20 minimum last year. Its corporate workforce is much whiter and makes much more money.

In addition to processing plants, Tyson also owns feed mills and hatcheries in the city, and contracts with poultry farmers (called “growers”) in rural Ozarks counties, including Benton and Washington, who “grow” the birds from chick to fullgrown and ship them back into town to be processed. With its processing workforce concentrated in the city’s core, and many of its contract poultry-growing operations in the rural reaches, Tyson’s economic reach is powerful, and its power over policymaking on the local, state, and federal levels gives it a unique place in a small metro economy.

It can be hard to cleanly separate the impact that the Tyson and Walton families, and their respective companies, have had on the cities The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville in 2011, with grants from the Walton family and foundation.

46 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

they occupy. The Waltons and the Tysons’ interests in regional development go back to the founding of the Northwest Arkansas Council by Walton, Tyson, and local trucking and transportation magnate J.B. Hunt in 1990. Their growth has been intertwined with each other, and their political and social spheres of influence are similar.

One distinction might be that Tyson’s economic impact has been felt by a broader swath of the regional population for much longer than Walmart’s. The poultry industry reshaped the regional economy before Walmart’s arrival on the scene reshaped national retailing. In contrast, Walmart’s impact on northwest Arkansas as a region exists on two vectors. First, there’s the company’s corporate footprint, including its implicit requirement that its suppliers and vendors have offices in the area, and a new 350-acre campus in Bentonville set to open in 2025; second, there are the family’s philanthropic and development activities.

The Waltons, whose family net worth of roughly $212 billion vastly outstrips the Tysons’ roughly $3 billion, have been steering the ship through their family philanthropy, the Walton Family Foundation, which makes more than $55 million worth of grants annually through its “Home Region” program, and invests many millions more into special projects, which include many efforts in northwest Arkansas. Bentonville’s ruling family has built a city—and increasingly, a region—with the kinds of amenities you need to attract a toptier corporate workforce: museums, private schools and well-funded charters, hotels, upscale restaurants, mountain biking trails, and private clubs.

For example, the foundation and Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam, financed the construction of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a worldclass art museum in Bentonville that opened in 2011. Exempt from state sales and use

With an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, there is no meaningful check on their power. taxes by legislative fiat, Crystal Bridges holds in its collection paintings like Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton, Warhol’s Dolly Parton, and Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter. A satellite campus for contemporary art, The Momentary, opened a few years ago in an old Kraft Cheese factory. Over the years, the entire project has cost the Waltons well over $1.3 billion.

The Waltons, and increasingly the Tysons, have seeded and funded other public art organizations like CACHE, which operates two art hubs, one in Springdale and one in Bentonville. The Waltons’ involvement in art, which some local artists feel has gentrified the local scene, is not purely philanthropic; the Runway Group, the two grandsons’ investment group, puts money toward public art as well through OZ Art. When either family foundation funds organizations that impact the region’s immigrant or low-income populations, it is often through grants for cultural programming, entrepreneurship, or direct service—not bad things to fund, but also not things that will change a regional economy constructed around haves and have-nots.

Many regional economic development, research, and planning functions are undertaken by the Northwest Arkansas Council, which has 100 members, most of them companies. The council has been instrumental in projects like extending Interstate 49 into Missouri, incubating and supporting nonprofits, and helping to shape downtowns and “cultural destinations” including a regional greenway, the University of Arkansas, and local museums and theaters.

The bulk of the council’s funding comes from the Walton Family Foundation, according to my review of Walton Foundation tax filings and the Northwest Arkansas Council’s income reports (as a 501(c)(3), the NWA Council Foundation is not required to

disclose its donors, but it does disclose the amount of contributions it received in total).

According to my analysis, the foundation provided 47 percent of the council foundation’s total contributions in 2020, 82 percent of the total in 2019, and 53 percent of the total in 2018.

Both Bentonville and Springdale have been beneficiaries of Walton family largesse. The city of Bentonville has received $12.9 million, going to projects like the regional greenway and park design, as well as funding for “complete street” infrastructure and a bike and pedestrian master plan for the city. Over the years, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $10.15 million to the city of Springdale, the vast majority of that in the last decade. That includes millions of dollars for the construction of bike trails and a greenway, and $2.8 million for a new municipal campus in the city, the brainchild of the foundation’s Design Excellence Program.

The municipal campus will occupy several city blocks near the newly revitalized downtown, home to mixed-use developments spearheaded in part by a real estate and development group affiliated with Tom and Steuart Walton, Sam’s grandsons.

Unlike its Walton counterpart, the Tyson Family Foundation flies under the radar.

It does not have a web presence or a readily apparent grantmaking process. Until recently, the Tyson Foundation’s relatively small grants were primarily used to support hospitals, colleges, and scholarship funds.

That has changed in recent years with the appointment of Olivia Tyson, the millennial daughter of John R. Tyson, as the foundation’s president.

A self-identified philanthropist, Olivia Tyson has reoriented her family foundation’s giving strategy around education, culture, and arts organizations in Springdale.

The company still maintains a more traditional presence in the community, donating chicken to local schools and food banks.

But the foundation has spent more than $1 million to fund “reimaginings” of two Arkansas arts organizations, one of them Arts One (formerly the Arts Center of the Ozarks), as well as several art “activations” at a former hardware store downtown. The foundation has also put money toward downtown Springdale’s revitalization work and towards CACHE, the Northwest Arkansas Council’s local art hub.

The sense in parts of the local nonprofit

world is that a new generation of Tysons is trying, in some sense, to play catch-up to the new generation of Waltons, tagging along on the coattails of the family that cemented itself more than a decade ago as the patrons of Arkansas culture and community. A grant contract I reviewed requires grantees to hashtag #tysonfamilyfoundation whenever they post about their projects on social media, an indication that the family is interested in burnishing its image, much like the Waltons have burnished theirs.

One of the most obvious ironies of Walton and Tyson corporate and foundation funding is the amount of money that has been poured into support for local small businesses and small-scale agriculture by the two companies perhaps most responsible for the decline of small businesses and the rise of industrialized agriculture nationwide. They are insufficiently patching part of a huge hole that they created with their price-slashing, wage-cutting, local economy–destroying activities, and patting themselves on the back for it.

Yet with an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, and with regional economic development initiatives dependent on their founding families’ wealth, there is no meaningful check on the power wielded by these billionaires and their Fortune 100 companies. It’s not just the Walton and Tyson family foundations that are dependent on the well-being of the companies; other local foundations and lots of local wealth have been created on the back of Walmart and Tyson’s jobs and stocks. The companies’ growth is directly tied to the amount of capital in the area.

The Waltons are laser-focused on creating an environment that caters to the kind of people they want working at their corporate headquarters, rather than for a competitor. Springdale is comparatively underresourced, if you measure in terms of how much a city looks like a place uppermiddle-class people would want to come to.

Their development efforts and amenities have been much more spare and less heavyhanded, at least until recently.

This is a big difference in the way that Bentonville and Springdale treat their company-town employees. Springdale’s processing workforce is much more interchangeable than Bentonville’s middle managers. A processing line worker is disposable; high turnover is a reality and even an expectation.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

48 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

to get ahead. “We have this gap of workers who don’t know where to go, what to do if they can’t find other jobs. They have to rely on charity, or whatever access they have to health care or food stamps,” Licolli said. “It keeps them in that status forever, in these cycles of poverty. And it’s just sad that these immigrants came for a better life, and at a certain point they felt they had a better life, and then everything gets lost immediately as soon as they get injured or lose their jobs.”

The Downtown Springdale Alliance and Downtown Bentonville, Inc., which function as public-private partnerships that work in coordination with local government, indicate just how far corporate capture has gone. Both have received substantial funding from the Tysons and the Waltons in recent years.

Tyson has played a major role in downtown Springdale’s revitalization plans, kicking off with a $1 million donation in 2015, and announcing the move of hundreds of its corporate workforce to a downtown campus located on the site of the company’s original hatchery. That was a centerpiece of the eventual downtown master plan, which devotes an entire section of downtown to the “Tyson District,” and a streetscape “designed to support the new office and retail uses of Tyson Foods Inc.’s new Downtown Springdale facility.” Since 2015, Tyson has opened two more facilities in downtown Springdale: an automation and robotics research center and a second corporate office.

Both cities’ plans highlight community engagement and stakeholder listening sessions, but the scope of possibility in downtown Springdale was limited by the overarching point of the revitalization: attracting professional-class millennials and explicitly urbanizing the region on the model of Austin, Raleigh-Durham, and other growing metro regions around the country.

The 13-person steering committee for the Bentonville Community Plan adopted in 2018 included five people with direct Walmart and Walton connections, as well as a “resident-at-large” appointment who had spent 15 years working for Walmart, the executive of a retail software company, and the director of Visit Bentonville, the city’s advertising and promotion department, which has received more than $620,000 in Walton Foundation funding over the last several years.

One of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education.

The Downtown Springdale Revitalization plan was similarly stacked. The steering committee’s chair is a Tyson Foods executive, and Carl George of the George’s, Inc., poultry family was on the committee as well, representing his family’s company and the Downtown Springdale Alliance, another public-private partnership heavily funded with Walton and Tyson funds.

George was once president of the Downtown Springdale Alliance.

The organization’s board is also filled with poultry and retail representation, including the president of Arvest Bank (which is chaired by Walton family member Jim Walton), a vice president of Tyson Foods, a representative from the Tyson Family Foundation, and the secretary of Blue Crane Development, a Walton project that has properties around northwest Arkansas.

The Tyson Family Foundation has invested just over $30,000 in the Downtown Springdale Alliance; the Walton Foundation has given about $1.6 million.

Blue Crane’s properties include a Springdale development called 202 Railside, near Tyson’s new corporate complex in downtown Springdale, billed as an “eclectic, premium” community for those looking for “urban sophistication.” 202 Railside is adjacent to one of the lowest-income census tracts in Springdale, and it offers a “workforce housing” program for people under certain incomes (for one person, the income limit is $61,824; for a family of six, $102,451—still well above average incomes for many Springdale residents). Would-be residents must pass credit and criminal background checks to qualify.

Downtown Bentonville, once a sleepy town square with a Confederate statue at its center (removed in 2020 after police teargassed racial justice demonstrators in the square; the statue is being transferred to a different park), has been completely remade

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Springdale did not invest heavily in its downtown until Tyson announced it was moving parts of its corporate workforce there.

Gachuzo-Colin, the Springdale city council candidate, is frustrated with the lack of attention paid to the side of town where working-class people live, who benefit less from the economic development and revitalization plans, the park projects, and the arts investments than the wealthy side.

“You’re not talking to the folks in your city when you’re building this shit. You’re talking to the new folks in the city. Why?” she said.

“Those Tyson workers, those George’s workers, those Cargill workers. Those are the people y’all should be trying to talk to. Those are the people who have busted their ass.”

Where Gachuzo-Colin lives, children walk to the local elementary school in the street because there are no sidewalks. She compares their experience to the experience of kids on the white side of town, where the sidewalks, she says, are big enough for golf carts. “Those are beautiful streets, ain’t got no potholes, got none of that,” she told me.

“I am going to make it my business to make sure that just like you can allocate the tax money over there, you should be able to allocate the tax money on the other side of town.

What’s the sense in thriving so that people outside of the city can see all this great stuff, when the people who are in the city are not impacted by all this great stuff?”

Indeed, one of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education. The Walton Foundation’s early roots were in the school choice and charter school movement, and it has not left that goal behind. Much of northwest Arkansas’s vast and growing public, charter, and private school network is supported by Walton Foundation donations—including nearly $8 million to the Thaden School, a private school near downtown Bentonville established in the mold of Andover and Exeter, as well as nearly $4 million to the Arkansas Arts Academy, and grants for local organizations that help parents (including low-income parents) decide where, out of this smorgasbord of options, to send their children.

Magaly Licolli, the co-founder of workers’ justice organization Venceremos, which organizes poultry workers in the state, explained that the immigrant workforce in Springdale’s poultry plants lives in almost perpetual precarity, while the dangers of the industry make it nearly impossible for them

in the last 15 years, transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like. Crafted in Walmart’s folksy, down-home image, downtown Bentonville tries to invite you in to its charm—come try an ice cream cone from the Walmart Spark Café, or shop at the original Walton’s 5 & 10, with Sam Walton’s old red Ford F-150 parked out front. The manufactured smalltown atmosphere in Bentonville comes at the expense of its authentic manifestations across the country.

Unsurprisingly, the Walton Foundation has invested handsomely in Downtown Bentonville, Inc., giving $1.12 million since 2015, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands granted to Visit Bentonville’s publicity operations. Through a maze of dozens of shell companies identifiable by their usage of two P.O. boxes connected to the Waltons, various members of the Walton family, and Walton Enterprises (the family’s corporate

arm), the family owns chunks of land in downtown Bentonville and beyond—much of it near mountain biking trails and greenways developed with Walton money, through millions in grants to the nonprofit NWA Trailblazers. The grandsons’ real estate development group has had a hand in BlakeSt., a private downtown Bentonville club, and high-end local restaurants, hotels, and event spaces in Bentonville.

Family members continue to buy land throughout the region, including in rural reaches of the Ozarks near the Buffalo National River and the Kings River, two major outdoor recreation destinations, where there are also landing strips for a recreational aviation organization piloted by the Runway Group named Fly OZ. Though the Waltons aren’t the only ones shaping the future of northwest Arkansas, the amount of money at their disposal often ensures that if they want something, it will get done.

The family doesn’t necessarily see it that way, though they implicitly recognize the power imbalance. “We by no means are pulling puppet strings or telling people what to do,” Steuart Walton told Downtown Bentonville’s media arm when asked about the perception that the Waltons control Bentonville. “I’m a little bit reminded of church night supper … Some people would bring a freaking salad bowl this big, and it was great, and even with everybody digging in they couldn’t eat it all. And some people would bring a 12-piece KFC, and that’s great too. Everybody’s pulling in the same direction.”

The dominance goes beyond economic development. As I reported for Facing South, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Arkansas’s Economic Recovery Task Force was led by Steuart Walton and staffed by several people deep in the Walton family’s web of organizations, including three Downtown Bentonville has been transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

In July, the Crystal Bridges museum opened an exhibit called “We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy.” Featuring an original copy of the Constitution, one of 11 known to exist, the exhibit puts the Constitution in conversation with other pieces of 50 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Tyson’s corporate headquarters has spurred Springdale’s downtown revitalization to attract a professional-class workforce. art that “provide diverse American perspectives on the nation’s founding principles,” according to the museum’s press release.

The museum includes art celebrating labor activists, a form of democratic organizing to which Walmart and Tyson are both actively hostile, and abortion rights organizers, in a state with a strict trigger law that now bans abortions, after Roe was overturned. It’s jarring to have the notion of people’s rule uplifted in a museum supported by funds from multinational corporations that have run roughshod over state and local policymaking, development, and labor rights.

Various Waltons and Tysons (and the companies’ PACs) have donated handsomely to politicians of both parties in Arkansas, but the majority of their donations in recent cycles are to Republicans, many of the same ones involved in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, attacks on public schools, and tax cuts for the wealthy—in the state legislature and in Congress.

Democracy is a radical notion, and one that has been undermined by corporate and billionaire activities in the northwest Arkansas region.

Many people in northwest Arkansas, including those involved with local com-

munity organizations and nonprofits, feel deeply indebted to the Waltons and Tysons, and are thus unable or unwilling to voice criticisms of them, even when they believe it’s deserved. A story I wrote about Waltonmotivated economic development’s impact on affordable housing in June resulted in a slew of off-the-record emails and DMs from people formerly or currently affiliated with organizations that receive funding from them. People are afraid that criticizing the powers that be will jeopardize their or their family members’ ability to get a job in the area.

This culture of silence extends to the media. For many years, Jim Walton was the primary owner of the two largest daily papers in northwest Arkansas, and the new Axios Local newsletter, launched last year (disclosure: I was recruited for a reporter role early in the process and ultimately chose not to pursue it) hired a former Tyson spokesperson, Worth Sparkman, as one of its two reporters.

Its daily newsletters are frequently sponsored by Walmart, the Walton Foundation, Ropeswing Hospitality (another group run

by Tom and Steuart Walton), or the Northwest Arkansas Council.

APRIL L. BROWN / AP PHOTO

people who then worked at the Runway Group and two others collectively referred to in meeting minutes as the “Walton Team.”

As I also reported for Facing South, when COVID-19 was ripping through Tyson plants in Springdale in the spring and summer of 2020, a fact consistently downplayed by the company, it involved Springdale’s mayor, Doug Sprouse, in its PR campaigns.

The crisis PR team drafted comments that were eventually attributed to Sprouse in Tyson press releases. In a promotional video filmed by and released for the company, Sprouse said, “What we’re finding out is that much more often than not [COVID-19] is being spread when they’re not at work, when employees are not at work.” A CDC team assessing COVID-19 outbreaks in the area at the time found that it was in fact “very difficult to attempt to disentangle” workplace spread from community spread, and that 40 percent of the first cases in household-wide outbreaks in northwest Arkansas’s Hispanic population and 28 percent in its Marshallese population were people who worked in poultry processing plants.

“When we organize an action, we know that Tyson already knows ahead of the game what our plans are because there is this connection” between the company and local officials, said Licolli of workers’ justice group Venceremos, which led organizing around outbreaks at Springdale poultry plants during COVID. Emails I obtained in a 2020 FOIA request bear this out. A senior vice president of Arvest Bank emailed the city in June 2020 ahead of a planned protest for poultry workers’ rights, saying, “We have to be careful that I don’t have a drive-up ATM anywhere nearby that has lots of cash in it that protestors could try to attack or have any of our employees in or around the area, move any bank vehicles, etc. This is just crazy!!” Sprouse, the mayor, forwarded her email to Jeff Wood, Tyson’s director of state and local government relations and a member of the board of directors of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. He also forwarded Wood the eventual permit Venceremos obtained for their protest.

The ability of businessmen to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many residents to vote.

In these two company towns, the amenities on offer are targeted toward the middle and upper-middle-class professionals like those Walmart, Tyson, and their families’ affiliated ventures hope to attract to the area. When the families and the corporations fund or draw attention to workingclass and immigrant communities, it is through grants to direct-service or cultural organizations. Systemic critiques of why working-class and immigrant communities struggle—critiques that would indict the companies on whose back the region’s growth is built—are much less welcome.

That’s one reason Yambú moved inTRANSitive to Little Rock, they told me.

“The corporations create this way you should be as the perfect queer person.

You can work for Walmart and be part of Walmart Pride, and go to the pride parades, but you’ve got to behave in the way that an ideal queer person would,” Yambú said.

“They’re the ones that will go and have drinks with them and talk nicely and laugh and wave a flag, but they won’t pressure them or try to get them to speak up when it comes to our rights being taken away.”

Last year, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. Despite a sustained and targeted campaign to get the Waltons to speak out against the bill as it made its way through the state legislature, the family was quiet until after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill (his veto was overridden by the state legislature). Tom Walton, the Home Region Program Committee chair, released a statement saying the family foundation was “alarmed” by the policy and that it “sends the wrong message to those willing to invest in or visit our state.” True to the family’s market-oriented stance, the statement asked state leaders to consider the impact of the legislation on future economic growth and the state’s potential. Yet

Walmart contributed $160,300 to anti-trans lawmakers in Arkansas, and Tyson gave $20,009, according to an analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy.

The lip service given to marginalized and working-class people, without meaningful action to support them, grates on some Springdale residents. “Everywhere you go you see little signs in Spanish, you see little signs in Marshallese, and that’s cute and everything. But what the fuck was that supposed to do?” said Gachuzo-Colin. “They have the ability to build a state-of-the-art park every six months. But you can’t figure out how to find a space to house people?”

Springdale’s recent outward veneer of concern for and inclusion of the city’s minority communities feels like a small victory, Gachuzo-Colin said, in the face of the city’s not-so-distant past as a sundown town. But it also feels like an attempt to brush over the inequities created by the industries that support Springdale—inequities of class, of race, and of country of origin.

The ability of businessmen and wealthy white people to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many Springdale residents to vote. Twenty-three percent of the city’s population is foreignborn, and 71 percent of those—roughly 14,240 people—are not U.S. citizens. As city council members consider new developments, new apartment complexes, and new park projects, Gachuzo-Colin says, they’re rubber-stamping projects that mostly aid the moneyed people in the city or the moneyed people whom the economic development projects are bringing in.

The immigrant workers mostly have no political voice.

The wealth of funding available in northwest Arkansas creates a bubble of sorts, with a hard outside limit for how far critiques of power and money can go. Northwest Arkansas is both the best place in the state to be a nonprofit and, if you’re making a systemic critique of power, the worst.

Foundations with corporate ties will fund what Yambú refers to as “ideal queers,” or charitable organizations with specific missions, but shy away from workers’ justice organizations, labor organizations, or nonprofits with more explicitly radical missions, ones that make systemic critiques of corporate influence and wealth. Licolli and Yambú both told me that they feel that the reason their organizations succeed is purely because of funders from out of state, who

believe in their radical missions and are not tied to Arkansas’s business elite.

“There is a lot of need in Arkansas, but there is never this question about why there’s so much need in Arkansas,” said Licolli. “Not only the nonprofits that provide service, but also the organizations that call themselves grassroots or pro-immigrant that really don’t want to talk about the impact of these corporations, because people are afraid of losing their funding or losing their jobs.”

Others in the region’s nonprofit and community organizing spaces feel more conflicted than that—they believe their work is important, and would be impossible without funding, but are also aware of the limitations inherent in the system as it currently exists. Northwest Arkansas is not alone in this reliance on philanthropy; it is a situation nonprofits nationwide find themselves in, a creation in part of the United States tax code and America’s reticence to break up big companies and tax their wealthy profiteers.

On its face, northwest Arkansas can look like a place with thriving communities and a democratic spirit. The ad campaigns of the Walton grandsons and the Northwest Arkansas Council certainly sell it as such.

But the reality is much more complex. Local governments and development policies at the behest of corporations, who also control the economic outcomes of most of their cities’ residents, are perhaps not democratic at all.

When participation in community work is all but contingent on adherence to deregulatory market norms propagated by two of the country’s largest companies, the boundaries on what is possible, and what can be conceived to be possible, are remarkably narrow.

In northwest Arkansas, the bounds are a commitment to capitalism, vertical integration, and monopoly control; to the belief in entrepreneurship and market-based ideologies as the solution to all social and economic problems. The problem is that, as Springdale’s continuing inequities show, a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats—and companies, corporations, and the families that control them have little incentive to create and support cities that are equitable, democratic, and just. n Olivia Paschal is a freelance writer and journalist from northwest Arkansas and currently based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Virginia.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

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CULTURE

A tribute to former GE CEO Jack Welch on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 2020

The Enablers of Predatory Capitalism

How free-market economists, central bankers, rapacious CEOs, and free-trade diplomats undermined the New Deal order RICHARD DREW / AP PHOTO

By Robert Kuttner For half a century, bad economics has provided intellectual cover for bad government. Those in charge preferred economists who would validate free-market fantasies, even though they had been disproven by events. The dominant policies served large banks and multinational corporations at the expense of working people. This was not only unjust; it was catastrophic. Mar-

kets mispriced carbon and generated global standing of the role of money, the banking climate disaster; they mispriced financial system, risk and uncertainty, and the failure securities and produced the collapse of of markets to price accurately, as well as his 2008; they deregulated labor, stagnating most famous insight—the related failure of the macroeconomy to equilibrate at a point wages even as GDP more than doubled. that realized its potential.

John Maynard Keynes demolBooks ished the premise of perfect market But “Keynesianism” was soon efficiency, revealing it to be a theowatered down by mainstream interretical and empirical fraud, and the Great preters into little more than a formula for Depression provided the exclamation point. using deficit spending to temper recessions.

Keynes’s economics combined a rich under- This was known as the neoclassical synAUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

CULTURE

The RAND Corporation, a Pentagon spinoff, became influential in promoting spuriously precise planning and budgeting.

thesis: a bit of Keynes grafted awkwardly onto the classical model of efficient markets.

Keynes’s great radical protégé Joan Robinson termed this bowdlerization “bastard Keynesianism.”

Politically, hyper-market economics ruptured the New Deal coalition and paved the way for Trumpism. If Democratic presidents (notably Clinton and Obama) were mainly serving Wall Street, and the activist state no longer advanced living standards of working families, then the bond between ordinary people and the Democratic Party was sundered.

Elizabeth Popp Berman, a University of Michigan sociologist and student of organizations, provides extensive details about how this reversion in the economics profession infected the deep state in her new book Thinking Like an Economist. Many of the instruments were pseudo-technical but deeply tilted in favor of the class status quo.

She describes the influence of the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon spin-off, in promoting a brand of spuriously precise planning and budgeting, with a subtle bias against public outlay. The Johnson administration, otherwise progressive in domestic economic matters, embraced this model, known as PPBS (Planning-Programming-Budgeting System). The BS part of this technocratic model insidiously undercut the political commitment to social spending.

In succeeding chapters, Berman shows how resurgent orthodox economics, with its central premise that markets are efficient, eviscerated the entire arsenal of the New Deal order, including antitrust, health care as a right, environmental and financial regulation, safe workplaces, and much more. And she demonstrates how centrist economics differed from its fundamentalist Chicago school cousin only in degree.

She explains how nominally neutral metrics such as cost-benefit analysis, rigged to exaggerate costs and understate benefits, were insinuated into the bowels of the policy process. Free-marketeers insisted that enforcers of clean air and worker safety legislation were wrong to prohibit some substances outright with no regard to the cost-benefit calculation. In fact, some chemicals such as DDT and polyvinyl chloride are too toxic to allow in any quantity.

Berman repeatedly refers to “the economic style of reasoning,” which prizes “efficiency, incentives, choice, and competition” 54 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

over “rights, universalism, equity, and limiting corporate power.” That’s a good description of market fundamentalism, but while free-market economists treated efficiency and equality as a “trade-off,” others never accepted that premise. I published a book in 1983 titled The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice, demonstrating that in several areas of public policy (education, health care, full employment, job training, honest financial markets) equality and efficiency worked in tandem, and I was in good company. Berman is mistaken to attribute free-market views to economists in general, as she does at points throughout the book.

Berman does acknowledge two of the dissenting traditions: institutional economics and industrial organization theory. Others that Berman doesn’t address include brilliant work in the broad Keynesian tradition such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); the research of Hyman Minsky, who demonstrated capitalism’s systematic propensity to financial collapse; and critics of orthodox trade theory such as Dani Rodrik. These prophetic dissenters were an opposition party in waiting. With President Biden’s rejection of neoliberalism, several economists working in these more progressive traditions got senior jobs in his administration. For an excellent discussion on the resurgence

of heterodox economics, see Harold Meyerson’s piece from our March/April 2021 issue, “The Berkeley School.”

Berman also errs when she asserts that earlier progressive policymakers simply opted for equality over efficiency. In fact, FDR promoted the New Deal as cost-effective as well as socially just. He insisted that public power was cheaper and better distributed than private power, and he was right. He demonstrated that the economy ran more efficiently when people were working rather than on the dole; that public investment was needed to complement what private markets failed to accomplish.

He paid careful attention to the costs and financing of Social Security, knowing that its credibility depended on its solvency.

If one can look past the overgeneralizations, Berman is well worth reading for deeply researched detail on how marketfundamentalist economics colonized the administrative state and thus weakened progressivism. Indeed, she demonstrates that the assault that came to full fruition under the Roberts-Trump Supreme Court began more than half a century earlier. Worse, it was the work of neoclassical economists who worked for Democratic presidents.

The triumph of free-market economics in the policymaking process not only influenced what government did. It altered the

CC AT TRIBUTION COOLCAESAR

norms of the corporate sector. As late as the 1970s, most large corporations operated as semi-benign paternalists, internalizing a reciprocal obligation to their workers and communities. The strength of the labor movement reinforced this more social conception of the corporation. But Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues contended that the only responsibility of a corporation was to maximize profits for its shareholders. By the 1980s, Friedman was pushing on an open door.

Jack Welch, the ruthless CEO of General Electric, epitomized the shift. He was lionized by the business press and became a role model for other executives. Financial writer David Gelles’s new book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, is a welcome corrective to earlier admiring biographies. Welch became CEO of GE in 1981, the same year that Ronald Reagan became president. Welch’s predecessor, Reg Jones, was his opposite in every respect. Under Jones and previous chief executives, GE had a tacit social compact with its workers. Jones earned a salary of just $200,000 a year, only about 12 times what junior management trainees made. GE was nicknamed Generous Electric. If you did your job well, you could expect to keep it for life. “This was blasphemy to Welch,” Gelles writes. “He found the notion that a company should be loyal to employees to be laughable.”

Welch inherited a basically healthy company. The year he took over, GE booked a profit of $1.5 billion, about $5 billion in current dollars. But in the inflationary 1970s, which had pummeled the stock market, GE’s share price was languishing and Welch was determined to change that. The credo “Move fast and break things” is attributed to Mark Zuckerberg. But literally before Zuckerberg was born (in 1984), Welch was pioneering that business model.

He soon laid off thousands of GE workers, spent $130 billion on mergers and acquisitions, and converted GE from a premier industrial corporation to a financial company. Soon, GE’s financial division was accounting for 60 percent of its profits.

During Welch’s tenure, the GE share price increased by about 21 percent per year for 20 years, far faster than the broad stock market. The total value of GE stock rose from $14 billion when Welch took over to $600 billion two decades later. But its people, communities, and contribution to America’s industrial excellence all suffered. He had

immense influence on the practices of corporate America. As Gelles writes, “Welch infected a new generation of business leaders with his values.”

Fittingly, the new financialized GE, and its financial arm GE Capital, was part of the collapse of 2008. Welch retired in 2001, just in time. In the years that followed, GE stock fell by 80 percent, making it the worst per-

Books mentioned in this review Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy

former in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and in 2008 GE needed a $139 billion bailout from the Obama administration.

Despite Gelles’s title, Welch did not “break capitalism.” What he broke was a more balanced form of capitalism that was normal for a generation thanks to the countervailing power of the state and of organized workers. When the state switched sides, it became all too easy for capitalists and capitalism to become more predatory.

Was something like Welch-style disruption necessary? The 1970s were a rough decade for American business. The cozy oligopoly capitalism that facilitated a social compact with organized labor in the years of the postwar boom was undermined both by inflation and by the recovery of Germany and Japan providing new competition. Certainly, American capitalism needed some shaking up. But there was a road not taken, one that included industrial policies and partnerships with unions. America’s German rival followed that road. This alternative path was not pursued at home because the White House under Reagan preferred to break unions and let free markets rip.

The free-market economists described by

Berman provided the intellectual script, and swashbuckling CEOs like Welch served as the instruments.

A prime vector reinforcing this shift a decade later was hyper-globalization. I wrote about this process in our June issue.

Reading Berman and Gelles together, you appreciate the synergistic and mutually reinforcing impact of free-market economics and predatory capitalist leaders like Welch. But Jamie Martin brings in the use of globalization to further undermine a social democratic brand of capitalism.

While there has been a great deal written about the post-WWII Bretton Woods era of managed capitalism and its shift into globally enforced neoliberalism, Martin’s contribution is to begin the story a generation earlier. His sly title, The Meddlers, suggests his orientation. The international bankers and globalist institution-builders of the 1920s were meddling with a presumption that had prevailed since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia: national sovereignty. Except for the boundary resets of wars, nations were supposed to be masters in their own houses.

But as Martin observes, in practice mutual respect for sovereignty applied only to Europe and North America. Colonized peoples had no sovereignty, nor did independent nations of the Global South, whose finances were often seized by multinational debt commissions. “Powerful states,” Martin writes, “had long coerced weaker ones into relinquishing their autonomy and assets.

But until this point, there were almost no examples of the government of a sovereign state willingly relinquishing control over vital economic matters to an external body.”

As commerce globalized, so did pressures to set global financial and economic norms.

There were harbingers of this before 1914, but with the destruction of the old political order in World War I, the architects of the new order attempted more explicit global rules.

There were, however, two practical problems.

One was hypocrisy. Some nations, per Orwell, were more sovereign than others. As Martin notes, Chinese delegates to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference tried to use the noninterference provisions of the League of Nations covenant to prevent further erosion of Chinese sovereignty. They were blown off. Likewise Latin American diplomats who later hoped the League would constrain U.S. interventionism in the Western hemisphere.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

CULTURE A second fault line was that the new transnational rules operated largely in service of a perverse and deeply conservative brand of economics. This meant promoting a reversion to the deflationary gold standard; priority for debt collection rather than debt relief; and enforcement of budget balance at the expense of economic recovery— this in a decade of deepening recession and unemployment. It all ended with the 1929 crash and the rise of Nazism.

Martin, an economic historian who recently moved from Georgetown to Harvard, explains how the unparalleled economic coordination among the allies during World War I (“a system of government purchasing, price-fixing, distribution and transport”) laid the groundwork for attempted delegations of sovereignty after war ended. Martin recounts in fascinating detail how these institutions in the 1920s imposed austerity disguised as debt relief, and the hapless efforts of smaller debtor nations and Germany to resist. The system’s architects also sought to create a central bankers’ central bank, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). National central bankers refused to cede much real authority to the new BIS, revealing where the real power lay. Martin also recounts littleknown and sometimes successful international efforts to stabilize commodity prices, as well as minimalist development and relief efforts that came with substantial strings.

One of his most insightful chapters compares the efforts of 1944 with those of the interwar years. The Bretton Woods system, the ideological opposite of the one that the meddlers of the 1920s created, was supposed to provide public capital and limit the deflationary influence of private banks and bondholders. The original IMF and World Bank, plus fixed exchange rates, capital controls, and the aid of the Marshall Plan, helped anchor a 30-year recovery.

But that system lasted for only a single generation before the power players in the capitalist global economy seized control once again. Soon, IMF aid was made conditional on budgetary austerity. Today’s global economic institutions like the World Trade Organization have enforcement powers to impose neoliberalism, of which the meddlers of the 1920s could only dream.

Progressives have long counted on the instruments of the state to temper the predations of the market and to constrain raw 56 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

capitalism. However, for more than a century one of the strongest state institutions has generally been an ally of financial capitalism: the Federal Reserve. And because of its substantial insulation from accountability (except to bankers), the Fed has resisted democratic control.

In past eras, the worst charge that critics could bring against the Fed was that it was too prone to raise interest rates at the first sign of inflation, thus ending recoveries prematurely and triggering needless recessions. The brilliance of Christopher Leonard’s book, The Lords of Easy Money, is that he faults the Greenspan-Bernanke-Powell Fed for the opposite abuse—keeping interest rates too low for too long. Since progressives were inclined to praise Ben Bernanke after 2008 for facilitating the recovery with cheap money and Jay Powell for continuing the policy, one’s first reaction is to wonder whether Leonard is some kind of monetary conservative. In fact, he is onto a deeper and much more astute critique.

Leonard’s basic argument is that the Fed has used ultra-cheap credit to bail out bankers and speculative investors without requiring any structural reforms in return.

The result has been a system biased toward insiders at the expense of ordinary people, one that both exacerbates extreme inequalities of wealth and sets the economy up for asset bubbles and periodic crashes.

The process begins with Alan Greenspan ostensibly playing against type and keeping interest rates very low in the 1990s and early 2000s. Greenspan’s main motivation was to rescue speculators in the aftermath of crashes. Wall Street even had a name for this: “the Greenspan put.” A put is a financial term for a guaranteed right to sell a security at a set price, and under Greenspan, the entire financier class benefited from it.

The story continues under Bernanke, who went Greenspan one better, with a new policy under the disarmingly technical name “quantitative easing” (QE). Translated into plain English, QE meant that the Fed would buy trillions of dollars of securities, not just its traditional investment in Treasury bonds but private mortgage-backed securities that were all but worthless in the absence of Fed purchases.

Leonard uses as his guide to the story a traditional honest conservative named Tom Hoenig, then the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Hoenig had been a critic of the new financial engineer-

For more than a century one of the strongest state institutions has generally been an ally of financial capitalism: the Federal Reserve.

ing, and as Bernanke kept increasing the Fed’s balance sheet to buy securities, he was often the lone dissenter in 11-to-1 votes of the Fed’s Open Market Committee.

In his telling of the story through Hoenig, Leonard makes one surprising and elementary error. He writes that quantitative easing began in late 2010. But that was when Hoenig began dissenting. In fact, the 2010 round of bond purchases was “QE2.” The initial round of quantitative easing and the introduction of the phrase began in the fall of 2008. Leonard also steps on his own story. His analysis of the dynamics and consequences of Wall Street–friendly easy Fed money is original and important, but it nearly gets buried under far too much biography of Hoenig, who was at most a second-tier player.

With both Obama and Trump failing to pursue other strategies of more balanced economic recovery, the Fed was the only game in town—but at a terrible price. One mystery was why inflation stayed so low for so long, which in turn validated the Fed’s policy of zero interest rates. The main reason turns out to be flat or falling real wages, which are in turn the bitter fruit of both union-bashing and hyper-globalization. The embedded labor costs of China’s repressed wages are reflected in product prices, as more and more of what we buy is made in China. The supply chain crisis ended the low inflation and with it the Fed’s policy of zero interest rates. Now the Fed, with only one tool, is reverting to its old habits of courting recession.

All of these institutions—the architecture of the administrative state, corporations tempered by strong unions, the terms of globalization, and even the Federal Reserve under FDR’s Fed chair Marriner Eccles— once served progressive purposes. And they could again. But in order to reclaim the institutions, we first need to reclaim the politics. n

How American Politics Turned Deadly

The explosive consequences of the realignment of the two major parties

By Paul Starr What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

By Michael Kazin Farrar, Straus and Giroux

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

The Destructionists: The TwentyFive-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party

By Dana Milbank Doubleday Three historic changes in the major parties and their social foundations have shaped American politics as we know it today.

The first, beginning in the mid-20th century, was the racial and regional realignment that has made the Democratic Party the home of Black Americans and majorities of other people of color, while enabling the Republicans not only to capture most Southern states but to become the majority party of white America.

The second was an independent though related cultural shift, in which women, people with nonconforming gender identities, and the more secular, urban, and bettereducated moved toward the Democrats, while the more religious, rural, and lesseducated, particularly men, moved into the Republican Party. The combined effect of these two general processes was to make the Democrats the party of racial and cultural transformation, while the Republicans became the across-the-board party of backlash even as they remained the party of business.

The third change has come as a shock, though perhaps it should have been anticipated as a result of the first two. This was the collapse of the center-right, the takeover of the Republican Party by its ethnonationalist right wing, and the resulting uncertainty as to whether Republicans can still be counted on to follow the basic rules of democratic government, like giving up power after losing an election.

While not framing recent changes in

these terms, two new books about the parKazin’s book is a sweeping history of ties—the historian Michael Kazin’s What the Democrats from the party’s origins in It Took to Win: A History of the Demo- the early 19th century down to the prescratic Party and the journalist Dana ent. Running through What It Took Milbank’s The Destructionists: The to Win is the idea that what it took Books Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the was, first of all, persuasively argued Republican Party—help us think about the commitments “to make the economy serve astonishing transformation that has over- ordinary people” and, second, the constructaken the parties and put the survival of tion of effective organizations to recruit American democracy in serious doubt. candidates, turn out voters, and absorb the AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

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“energies of rising social movements.” The party was able to do those things during the only two periods when it had “durable majorities,” from the late 1820s to the mid1850s and from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

As Kazin makes clear from the start, the Democrats’ egalitarianism was originally limited: “It took a hideously long time for the self-proclaimed ‘party of the people’ to welcome the support and fight for the needs of Americans whose skin was not white and whose gender was not male.” Well into the 20th century, the Democrats were the party of white supremacy, unable to win power nationally without the Jim Crow South.

Nonetheless, Kazin argues, the party provided the vehicle for two distinct, though not necessarily incompatible, egalitarian tendencies. The first was an anti-monopoly current, which dominated the party’s early history; the second was a pro-labor current, which became central during the New Deal in the 1930s. The first tendency resisted concentrations of economic power; the second resisted exploitation in the workplace. Each tendency created the basis for a majority coalition. Anti-monopoly united Southern 58 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

and Western agrarians and Catholic immigrants against industrialists, high tariffs, and Wall Street. The pro-labor tendency united working- and middle-class Americans behind policies such as rights to collective bargaining and Social Security.

The anti-monopoly and pro-labor tendencies are still present in the Democratic Party today, but the party is now also the vehicle for egalitarian challenges to racial and gender inequalities that also involve making the economy (and society more generally) serve the great majority, indeed, a greater and more inclusive majority than in the past. But the new tendencies arouse deep-seated anxieties and resentments and have complicated the party’s efforts to do what it takes to win.

The political scientist Eric Schickler’s 2016 book Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism provides what may be the best account of how the Democrats’ transition from a white supremacist to a racial egalitarian party came about. The conventional view of the realignment emphasizes the Democrats’ national embrace of civil rights under Lyn-

don Johnson and views the role of the states mainly in terms of the South’s resistance to desegregation. In contrast, Schickler argues that, beginning in the late 1930s outside the South, an alliance in support of civil rights captured the Democratic Party from below.

That alliance had critical support from liberal Democratic leaders in states like Pennsylvania, who saw opportunities to win over Black voters, and from the leadership of the industrial unions, which needed to organize Black factory workers. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North was a critical factor in this process. Fearful of losing the white South, however, the party’s national leaders had to be pressured to change. At the 1948 Democratic national convention, it was a local leader, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, who spoke for the liberal-labor-Black alliance when he presented the civil rights plank whose adoption led to a walkout by Southern Dixiecrats.

This was the beginning of a transformation that over the next decades put the Democrats on the side of racial equality.

Kazin sums up the eventual significance of that breach: “For Democrats, the demand

AP PHOTO

Hubert Humphrey’s demand for a civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention began to put the party on the side of racial equality.

As one elite, the very rich, remained Republican, another elite, the educated and culturally influential, became Democratic. for Black empowerment was a ‘time bomb’ with a long fuse planted by left-wing New Dealers and their union allies during the 1940s. When it detonated in the mid-1960s, it fragmented the party and did much to bring an end to the New Deal order that labor, the white South, urban machines, and liberal activists had built together.”

Supporters of other marginalized groups planted time bombs with even longer fuses.

The racial realignment played out over decades. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Democrats still drew much of their support in Congress from Southern conservatives and moderates; during the same period, the only presidents the party was able to elect, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were Southern governors who held on at least to some Southern states. In 1949, the historian Richard Hofstadter had written that the Democratic Party was “in the anomalous position of being a party of ‘liberalism,’ whose achievements are subject to a veto by a reactionary faction.” The Southern veto long blocked civil rights measures, and it limited others as well. By the mid-1960s, Democrats were able to pass civil rights legislation not only because of increased strength outside the South, but also because of support for the legislation from liberal and moderate Republicans, including the Republican leader in the Senate, Everett Dirksen. But Southern Democratic power brokers continued to hold back progressive policy in Congress long thereafter—and even today Joe Manchin still plays that role, at a time when Democrats cannot count on any Republicans to cross over to support even mildly progressive legislation.

Kazin lays some of the blame for the party’s post-1960s decline at the feet of Lyndon Johnson for ignoring a “primary lesson” of the New Deal, which was to enact measures serving the great majority. Instead, Kazin writes, Johnson’s war on poverty, except for Medicare and aid to education, “got viewed as benefits to poor and mostly non-white

Americans … It was a sincere appeal to the better angels of the nation, but it was not effective politics.”

I hesitate to put any blame on the war on poverty. The transition from a white supremacist to a racial egalitarian party was bound to take a toll on the Democrats’ earlier majorities. A different mix of social policies in the mid-1960s might not have made much difference, especially given all the damage the Democrats suffered from the Vietnam War. If not for Vietnam, Humphrey might have won the presidency in 1968 or Johnson might have run successfully for re-election; as it turned out, Richard Nixon’s election that year anticipated an era of Republican dominance. But neither the metaphorical war on poverty nor the real war in Vietnam caused the long-term shift in party dominance. In the long run, the Democratic Party became the vehicle for cultural as well as racial change, and it had to absorb the brunt of overlapping racial, religious, anti-feminist, and homophobic backlashes. This has been the larger context of the party’s struggles.

In the great cultural transformation from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the courts did most of the heavy lifting, but there was no mistaking which party supported those decisions and was prepared to carry them out. Yet over that same period, Democrats (and the courts) did little to advance a prolabor agenda—indeed, the party did virtually nothing to protect and promote unions while employers mounted an intense campaign against them. The old anti-monopoly concerns had also faded. So, whatever Democrats might say, their “revealed preferences,” to use the economists’ phrase, favored the new egalitarian tendencies in the party over the earlier ones.

Why did the Democratic Party make that choice? A large part of the explanation is that the party’s base changed. Industrial workers not only declined in number but turned politically to the right, while the college-educated not only increased but became more liberal. As one elite, the very rich, remained Republican, another elite, the educated and culturally inf luential, became Democratic but did not necessarily identify with unions. With demographic change came an increase in the nonwhite electorate and gave Democrats a broader base among people of color than had Black voters alone. The gender divide became more important. The “gender gap” in vot-

ing used to be conceived as a political difference between Republican-trending men and Democratic-trending women; now it’s also a gap between straight and LGBT+ voters. All these changes have tended to give priority to racial and gender egalitarianism in the Democratic Party, to increase the salience of those issues in American politics, and to feed the resentment, anger, and moral panic that have energized the contemporary right and transformed the Republican Party.

Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists recounts the Republican Party’s transformation over the past 25 years. This is not a story about anything so profound as a change in political philosophy or even a shift in policy positions. It is a tale instead of the shedding of all restraint in the drive for power, a process that began long before Donald Trump.

Contrary to many accounts of partisan polarization, the change in American politics has not been symmetrical. One party has continued to observe the norms of democratic government and respect for truth, while the other hasn’t. “Republicans,” Milbank writes, “have been hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society for a quarter century” in four ways: “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions and norms of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence.” The Destructionists is a journalist’s recap of that history, reminding readers of the long series of right-wing fabrications and obsessions since the early 1990s, from the supposed murder of Clinton’s assistant White House counsel, Vincent Foster, to the Big Lie of the 2020 stolen election. Newt Gingrich taught Republicans how to win elections with the relentless use of phony scandals, conspiracy stories, and slurs debasing their opponents. Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes used the same techniques to reshape rightwing media. Rather than creating anything new, Trump merely exploited the pattern of mendacity and vilification that others had already shown to be successful strategies in arousing the base of the Republican Party.

But if Trump was only the culmination of a long process, why did that process happen in the first place? Milbank doesn’t offer a general explanation, although his narrative suggests two relevant points. Discussing AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

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Newt Gingrich taught Republicans how to win elections using phony scandals, conspiracy stories, and slurs.

60 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Both the Democrats and Republicans have thrown off the restraints that once held them back— but with radically different effects.

Still, Republican leaders could have chosen differently. Milbank mentions that after Obama’s re-election in 2012, the Republican National Committee issued a post-mortem recommending that the party compete for rising numbers of Hispanic and Asian voters by supporting such policies as immigration reform. Instead, the party did the opposite, and it is hard to say that, from the standpoint of partisan self-interest, its choice was irrational. Not only did Trump get elected; Republicans at lower levels appear to have suffered little penalty for extremism. The direction taken by the party expresses powerful impulses among its supporters. Those impulses are not new, but they are now out in the open, and under Trump the party’s leadership has doubled down on them.

Since the mid-20th century, both the Democrats and Republicans have thrown off the restraints that once held them back—but with radically different effects.

Both parties used to be ideologically heterogeneous, and as a result they each had internal checks. The Democrats were constrained not only by the Southern veto but also by culturally conservative Democratic voters, many of them working-class. As those influences weakened, the party was first able to respond to Black demands for civil rights and later able to support the rights of other marginalized groups. The Republicans had the internal check of a moderate and in some respects distinctly liberal faction, which kept their party from becoming outright racist and reactionary.

As the party shed those liberals and moderates, it became a vehicle for more extreme, ethnonationalist tendencies. Some on the right today genuinely believe the conspiracy stories and lies, while others just opportunistically fall in line. It doesn’t matter: The opportunists are as dangerous as the true believers. The Republican Party is on a desperate path, and we have no way of anticipating how deep into the authoritarian abyss it is prepared to go. n

CHRIS MARTIN / CQ ROLL CALL VIA AP IMAGES

Gingrich’s rise to leadership in the House, he mentions that Bob Michel, the Republican leader whom Gingrich replaced, was a World War II veteran who followed the gentlemanly norms of bipartisan comity and compromise that had prevailed in Congress. The demands for national unity during World War II and the Cold War had fostered partisan self-restraint. Once the Cold War was over, the road was open to bare-knuckled partisan aggression.

The other relevant point has to do with the rational basis of that aggression for Republicans. Demographic and cultural change have been working against them. Theirs is a party with a base of older white voters smoldering with rage about a changing America. As Milbank notes, there is a “perfectly logical, if deeply cynical, reason” why “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy.” Going back to 1992, they have lost the popular vote for president in seven out of the last eight elections. The turn toward authoritarianism has also had a rational basis because Republicans now have an entire media ecosystem of their own, including Fox, Breitbart, and right-wing talk radio, effectively blocking the mainstream media from confusing the party’s base with actual news.

In Season 3 of ABC’s A Million Little Things, Maggie Bloom (Allison Miller, right) decides to have an abortion.

Hollywood’s Role in Stigmatizing Abortion

walk. An American Horror Story: Cult episode depicted a woman hemorrhaging on a gurney post-abortion. In many separate plotlines on the period piece Call the Midwife, characters are often rendered infertile or suffer grisly deaths as a result of unsafe illegal abortions.

Some of this is driven by the conventions of drama, particularly in the genres noted above (legal procedural, horror, and hisincreased dramatically; we tracked just 13 torical fiction). Risk makes for a compelling plotlines in 2016, compared to 47 in 2021. Yet narrative; even car accidents on television the stubborn endurance of cultural myths are often more dangerous than they are in about abortion—that it is unsafe, that it is real life. But while viewers have a way of uncommon, or that it is easy to access—is contextualizing car accidents with their no doubt facilitated, at least in part, by the own experiences of regularly driving or riding in vehicles, they do not have a similar ubiquity of these myths on-screen.

Take safety, for example. Abortion is ability to do so for abortion. Even though abortion procedures are very comone of the safest outpatient proceMovies and dures in the United States; fewer mon (about 1 in 4 women will have Television than 0.25 percent of abortions result an abortion by age 45), they are often in a major complication. Yet on television, hidden from view. Few people, especially nearly 19 percent of abortions result in a those who are anti-abortion, know that their major, adverse medical complication, a loved ones have had abortions.

This creates a huge personal, political, over 70-fold exaggeration. On a 2021 Law & Order: SVU episode, a character unknow- and cultural void in our collective underingly ingests the abortion pills mifepris- standing of abortion experiences, and leaves tone and misoprostol and is later discovered people lacking the understanding that a unconscious and bleeding out on the side- medically risky abortion on TV is depicting

And its responsibility now

By Steph Herold As we collectively reel from the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, every reproductive rights movement conflict, messaging failure, and cultural flashpoint is facing public scrutiny, in an attempt to place a retrospective narrative on the unraveling of abortion rights in the United States. Many are looking to entertainment media, noting its role in promoting support for other progressive issues, and asking, Why hasn’t Hollywood told more stories about abortion?

But this is the wrong question. Hollywood has always told stories about abortion, from the earliest silent films to television’s pre-Technicolor era. In recent years, the number of abortion stories on-screen has

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

CULTURE The majority of characters who have abortions are younger, whiter, and wealthier than their real-life counterparts. an extreme anomaly. Because viewers tend to incorporate what they watch on television into their political views, even if it’s fictional, these inaccurate depictions could lead people to mistakenly believe that abortion needs to be more regulated to address nonexistent safety concerns. Research actually suggests the opposite problem—existing restrictions serve to make abortion less safe, instead of contributing to better patient outcomes.

Some inaccuracies are more subtle yet still troubling. Television misrepresents both who obtains abortions and why. The majority of characters who have abortions are younger, whiter, and wealthier than their real-life counterparts, and they are rarely depicted as raising children at the time of their abortions. More than half of the abortion plotlines over this past year have included characters with these demographics, such as Max on Better Things, Shauna on Yellowjackets, and Maggie on A Million Little Things. It’s not that these stories are unimportant or should not be told, it’s that they should not be the singular abortion stories depicted in popular culture.

This means that the majority of people who have abortions do not see themselves or their experiences represented on-screen, and viewers do not understand the intersectional nature of abortion access. In depicting abortion as an issue for (mostly) young, white non-mothers, media erases the ways that racism and classism impact access to abortion. If viewers don’t see that people have trouble paying the hundreds or thousands of dollars for the cost of an abortion out of pocket because their insurance doesn’t include that service, they may be less inclined to understand the desperate need to ensure that both Medicaid and private insurance cover abortion costs. Relatedly, the most common reasons real patients seek abortions—being financially unprepared to care for a(nother) child, a mistimed preg62 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

nancy, not wanting to parent with their current partner, and wanting to focus on parenting the children they already have— are rarely represented on-screen.

It’s not just the who and why of abortion that’s inaccurate in television and film, it’s the how. Sixty-seven percent of characters who have abortions encounter no barriers at all, meaning that when they decide they want an abortion, they face none of the logistical and financial hurdles that their real-life counterparts must overcome. When discussing past abortions, many characters recall the emotionality of the moment, and that is the complete story of their abortion.

On Queens, pop star Valeria talks about not regretting prioritizing her career over motherhood, and on The Good Doctor, medical resident Jordan confesses that she doesn’t regret a past abortion despite being religious. The story of how they accessed the abortion, and what logistical and financial hurdles they had to clear along the way, remains completely untold. Even on shows with characters who otherwise struggle to make ends meet (Annie on Shrill, Ruth on GLOW), when it comes to their abortions, there’s no mention of how they come up with the money. These types of omissions obscure the reality of abortion care in the United States, a reality made more dire by the recent Dobbs decision but which, for most people seeking abortion, was present well before it.

The vast majority of abortion patients must take days off work and find child care to travel dozens or hundreds of miles to the nearest clinic. Once there, patients face a barrage of abortion restrictions designed to delay or impede their care, from mandatory waiting periods (which forces them to pay for extra nights at a hotel), gestational age bans, prohibitions on specific types of abortion procedures, and many other cruelly tedious and medically extraneous rules. Yet on-screen, these barriers are rarely visible, despite the fact that they would no doubt make for excellent drama, conflict, humor, and character development. This may cause viewers to buy into the anti-abortion myth that abortion is too easy to access, causing them to support policies that place abortion further out of reach for the millions who need this care.

When an actual abortion is depicted, what do viewers see? Half of the abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, yet portrayals of abortion pills in both television

and film remain scarce, leaving audiences without depictions of the most common type of abortion in the country today. This pattern contributes to confusion about abortion pills: their risk, the experience of taking them, and, importantly, the difference between emergency contraception like Plan B, taken within three days after sex to prevent pregnancy, and medication abortion, either with the pills mifepristone and misoprostol or misoprostol alone, taken to end a pregnancy.

The majority of Americans are deeply confused about this difference, and more accurate and common portrayals could help viewers distinguish between these medications, understand how safe abortion pills are and that buying abortion pills online is an option (even if legally risky), and learn how to support someone who needs an abortion in a legally restricted landscape.

These misrepresentations are not just alarming because they are inaccurate.

The American public knows so little about abortion that the explicit and implicit messages these portrayals impart generate a disproportionate impact relative to their prevalence. After all, television has a profound influence on attitudes about a variety of health topics, from organ donation to cancer screenings, that are much less stigmatized than abortion. When audiences encounter an abortion plotline onscreen, it may be the first time that they are seeing abortion depicted as a personal experience instead of as a political or cultural lightning rod. The more connected they feel to the character, the more likely the depiction is to influence their attitudes and beliefs.

Of course, no one expects television to present a mirror image of reality, especially entertainment television. But again, because abortion is both highly stigmatized and uniquely politicized in American culture, every representation of abortion carries much more significance than depictions of other medical procedures. When content creators misrepresent every facet of abortion access, we cede the public imagination to misinformation provided by anti-abortion campaigns and policies.

In the days since the Dobbs decision, Hollywood actors and creators alike have shared their political outrage and their personal experiences with abortion. This is both wonderful to see and not nearly enough. It’s time for Hollywood to embrace

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) offers a more realistic portrait of the realities of obtaining an abortion. its liberal reputation and tell braver stories about abortion. We don’t just need more abortion stories, we need more compassionate, loving, accurate, and stigma-free stories that also contend with the reality of abortion access in the U.S. today.

We need stories that uncover the nittygritty of not having insurance that covers abortion and the creative ways people raise money, including seeking care from abortion funds and practical support organizations. We need to make visible the scramble to find child care and coverage at work shifts so you can show up for your appointment, and the endless drive to find an open clinic.

Some recent films—including Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), Unpregnant (2020), and Little Woods (2019)—have taken this on, though their protagonists are young white women. We need to see more showrunners, producers, and writers following in their footsteps, but centering the narratives and experiences of people of color. We need depictions that give life to abortion as an issue of race, class, gender, and family. This could look like parents of color supporting each other through their abortions with love, compassion, and kindness as they deal with all the messy parts of life (that make for such good television). We need to see queer, trans, and nonbinary characters having abortions, providing abortions, and supporting friends through their abortions.

Diligent showrunners and writers often turn to experts for support and guidance on how to portray health topics on television,

and abortion is no exception. Yet even today, the experts who are consulted on abortion depictions are often friends of writing staff or researchers (myself included!). Undoubtedly, TV and film writers have had abortions, but writing rooms and Hollywood in general remain dominated by middle-class white people whose experience of abortion access is very different from the typical abortion patient’s. There are abortion storytellers from organizations like We Testify who frequently share their experiences with news media; showrunners and producers could invite these storytellers into writing rooms to share their experiences and partner on future story lines, giving those plots an emotional, social, and logistical accuracy.

In interviews with over 40 television showrunners, writers, and producers, I heard over and over again about barriers to getting series about abortion from page to screen, including preconceived notions that American audiences would not tune in for this kind of content, and fears about objections from advertisers or anti-abortion viewers. Networks should not let abortion stigma and misinformation drive their decision-making. The American public vastly favors access to abortion, and abortion has infinite storytelling potential, involving sex, love, death, family, religion, power, relationships, gender, and politics.

A single character who has an abortion, or one abortion disclosure in an entire series, is simply not enough. To make significant strides in changing cultural atti-

tudes about abortion, we need multiple series with abortion at the center, instead of pushed to the margins of a single episode arc. We need a Parks and Recreation–style workplace comedy set in an abortion clinic, time-traveling abortion providers who provide care to famous historical figures, dramas about parents who journey from state to state with their kids in tow providing abortions and raising their families. The narrative possibilities are limitless if only networks put the resources behind writers ready to tell these stories.

Hollywood has always found ways to tell stories about abortion, and these flawed portrayals have contributed to cultural myths and misinformation. As content creators wrestle with their responsibility in a post-Roe world, they should explore every avenue and every genre to tell diverse, nuanced, accurate stories. With the nation’s largest anti-abortion group seeking to ban even sharing information about abortion, television and film may soon be one of the only forums that provides depictions of the safety and necessity of abortion care. Storytellers can show the public that, no matter the national or state-by-state laws, everyone deserves access to a safe abortion. n Steph Herold, MPH is an award-winning researcher with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), where she studies the portrayal of abortion on television and in film in the Abortion Onscreen program.

AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

PARTINGSHOT

Interview With a Straw Woman She’s had 63 and a half abortions—will she now change her ways?

Luz Cookie is 45 minutes late to our interview. We meet in a sports bar near Wall Street, where she says she likes to “bag drunk richies like J.Lo in Hustlers.” When Ms. Cookie arrives, decked out in twisted fishnets and messy mascara, she apologizes, telling me it’s better she’s late than her period. The conversation that follows is 100 percent true and absolutely does exist outside of Ted Cruz’s mind.

penis on a live stream. Do you feel like maybe there’s a limit to your pro-choice stance?

Look, I’ve eaten so much penis, I figured why not actually eat a penis. And it was consensual.

Did you cook it?

Does the microwave count?

How are you feeling now that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade? Are you concerned that your access might be limited?

Absolutely. I’m actually terrified.

Francesca: So you have had multiple abortions. Why do you think it has been so stigmatiz– wait, are you taking misoprostol right now?

Ms. Cookie: Yeah, well it takes a few hours to kick in. I prefer to abort in the evenings with a nice glass of wine while watching the Muslim Ms. Marvel.

Even with Plan C being available in the mail at plancpills.org?

Oh yeah, even if I use a private browser.

Wait, so will this make you change your sexual habits?

For sure. If I can’t have a safe abortion, I have no choice but to immediately cease having sex for pleasure.

So exactly how many abortions have you had?

One for every cat I own.

How many is that?

Six–

Just like that?

Just like that. I’ll probably get married too. I’ll find an average man whose dreams I can support after I abandon my career and stop studying for the bar. I’ll have five of his children, buy all my clothing from Chico’s, go to church every Sunday, and vote for Ron DeSantis. A strong country needs a strong man, and a strong man needs a strong wife to raise his progeny while he sleeps with other women.

Wow, six …

–ty-three. This will be 64. I’ve gotta go to the shelter tomorrow and pick out another furball. It’s kitten season!

Sixty-four cats must be a lot of work.

Not at all. Just feed ’em what I dumpster dive and throw a halfopen Bible down for a litter box.

Plus they’re a great distraction while I’m completing my third master’s in postcolonial Marxist feminist dance choreography with a focus in Taylor Swift, and actively aborting.

I see. You’ve been called the “Yas Queen of Abortions” by TikTok. You regularly post videos of your abortions to your two million followers, and at one point ate a human 64 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022

Can I ask, why not use birth control, the pill or an IUD? Honestly? The boobs. Look at these puppies. Progesterone makes them pop. Then I just flush out the rest, but the boobs last for at least three months. Plus that first-trimester morning sickness keeps the pounds off and Boom! Your girl is bikini-ready for the summer.

Have you slept with any conservatives?

Of course! They always pay for dinner and there’s always leftovers for my cats. But their mommy issues are no joke. Why do you think I’ve aborted so many of their babies?

I don’t need that baggage.

And what if they get pregnant?

Oh, he can just use the kids’ college fund to pay for an abortion. After all, higher learning is just all about critical race theory.

I see. Well, thank you for your time.

God bless you.

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN / GET TY IMAGES

By Francesca Fiorentini

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The essentials for a better life for all

hurt even more because the federal minimum wage has been just $7.25 since 2009. They hurt because Republicans in Congress keep blocking efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs. They hurt because private equity firms are scooping up real estate—causing the price of rent and homes to skyrocket. And higher prices hurt because employers keep beating back unionization drives.

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

I

and school staff across America, along with tips to promote literacy and a love of reading.

t is impossible to capture all we have been through the past two years: A pandemic, and a plot to overturn a presidential election. Mask wars, culture wars and a war on truth. Floods in Puerto Rico, and fires in New Mexico. Shattering gun violence in Uvalde, Buffalo, Highland Park and so many other communities. Racism and the fear and trauma it inflicts. A right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that undermined the Constitution’s separation of church and state; overturned Roe v. Wade; and hobbled Miranda v.

Arizona, the Environmental Protection Agency, and states’ ability to keep their citizens safe—all in a single month. Oil companies and other corporations are reaping record profits yet squeezing us dry at the pump and the grocery store.

We are working to expand access to another essential—community schools, which help children and families get healthcare, food assistance and other necessities in one place. The AFT and our affiliates currently support more than 700 community schools nationwide. We have an ambitious goal: to expand our reach to 2,500 community schools over the next five years.

Of course, the people who do all this are essential. But a recent Gallup poll found that K-12 professionals are the most burned-out workers in America. Teachers and school staff have been struggling for years with a lack of respect, inadequate resources, subpar compensation and endless paperwork. And then came COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, nearly 300,000 teachers left the profession each year—two-thirds before retirement age.

More than 3,000 AFT members gathered recently in Boston for our first in-person convention since the COVID-19 pandemic. As I told them, this moment can be viewed through the lens of fear or hope; despair or aspiration; self-interest or the greater good. As I have traveled the country visiting members—teachers and school staff, nurses and healthcare professionals, public employees, and college faculty and staff—I have seen that they definitively, defiantly and undeniably choose hope, aspiration and the greater good.

The AFT is not just decrying this problem, we are finding solutions. AFT convention delegates approved a resolution from our Teacher and School Staff Shortage Task Force, identifying key areas that need to change: climate, culture, conditions and, of course, compensation.

They’ve done it by focusing on the essential foundations for a better life for all. Essentials like safety, whether commonsense gun safety or protections for our LGBTQIA+ students. And essentials like the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in today’s world—reading, math, science, and practical life skills and critical thinking.

Reading is another essential. It not only affects all other academic achievement, it’s essential for well-being and to unlock life’s possibilities. Through the AFT’s Reading Opens the World campaign, we are giving more than 1 million books to children

This is a moment to stand up and be counted, to live our convictions, to engage not withdraw.

We must fight for our children and our country, for our democracy and our freedoms. We must act to fulfill our aspirations—by voting, by fighting for an economy that works for all, and by ensuring every child has access to safe, welcoming, well-resourced public schools.

That is how to achieve a better life for all.

This moment can be viewed through the lens of fear or hope; despair or aspiration; selfinterest or the greater good.

Photo: Michael Campbell

To recommit to those essentials, the AFT has launched our new What Kids and Communities Need campaign. While some politicians are trying to drive a wedge between parents and teachers by banning books, censoring curriculum and politicizing public education, we’re focused on investing in public schools and the essential knowledge and skills students need. We’re focused on accelerating learning, not just catching up. We are fighting for the conditions students need to thrive, like schools with good ventilation, smaller class sizes and mental health resources. If politicians truly want to help kids thrive, they need to invest in this too.

Another essential is making the economy work for all, especially as working people struggle with higher prices for almost everything. Higher prices

As Americans, we have an essential obligation to defend our democracy. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has presented shocking evidence of how Donald Trump and his allies tried to prevent the peaceful transition of power. And anti-democracy forces who worked overtime in advance of the 2020 elections to limit voting rights now are laying the groundwork to interfere with vote counting and even manipulate the outcome in future elections.

Weingarten addresses delegates to the American Federation of Teachers convention on July 14 in Boston.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/RWeingarten

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The PESSIMIST complains about the wind;

the OPTIMIST expects it to change;

the REALIST adjusts the sails.

WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD

36 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2020